Artist Ayoung Kim. Photo: Lim Ji Hoon. © Chosun Ilbo
Korean contemporary media artist
Ayoung Kim has been selected as the recipient of the 38th Lee Jung-seop Art
Award.
Kim has attracted significant
attention in the Korean and international art worlds through her active
presentation of works that fuse science-fiction (SF) imagination with media
technologies.
In 2021, she became the first Korean
artist to receive the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica, and in 2025, she was
named the recipient of the LG-Guggenheim Award, presented by LG and the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum.
This year, she was selected for the
“Thinkers” category of TIME’s TIME100 AI 2026, further establishing her as a
leading artist who prompts new reflections on the contemporary technological
age.
Installation view of 《Ayoung Kim: Deliver Dancer Codex》, MoMA PS1, New York, 2025. Photo: John Kim. © MoMA PS1
The jury—Kang Seung-wan, Sunjung Kim,
In-hye Kim, Jung-hoon Shin, and Yeon Shim Chung—explained their decision,
stating, “Ayoung Kim has expressed through her art the anxiety and alienation
experienced at the intersection of the transition into the digital world. This
resonates with the artistic spirit of Lee Jung-seop, whose work captured the
anxieties of the period of transition from the modern to the contemporary era.”
Although Lee Jung-seop and Ayoung Kim
belong to different generations, their practices share an intriguing point of
connection: both confront unstable worlds by transforming and distilling the
pressures and tensions of reality into distinctive visual languages.
Living through an era marked by war
and poverty, Lee conveyed the scars of his time and a powerful vitality through
his iconic bull motifs and paintings on tinfoil.
Kim, meanwhile, reconfigures
contemporary technologies such as AI and CGI into her own visual language to
explore the anxieties of our time, social alienation, and questions of labor
and survival.
Installation view of 《Ayoung Kim: Deliver Dancer Codex》, MoMA PS1, New York, 2025. Photo: Ayoung Kim Studio. © Ayoung Kim
The Lee Jung-seop Art Award was
established in 1988 by the Chosun Ilbo and the Bang Il-Young Foundation to
honor the artistic legacy of painter Lee Jung-seop (1916–1956). The recipient
receives a cash prize of KRW 20 million and a commemorative plaque.
The award ceremony will be held at 5
p.m. on October 29 at Art Chosun Space in Gwanghwamun, Seoul. An “Artist Talk”
commemorating the award will take place at the same venue on November 5.
