Through Dec 6
Korea Artist Prize 2026
Jul 24 – Dec 6, 2026
Jinhwon Hong, Hyunsun Jeon, Haemin Lee, Jeongwoo Lee
Korea Artist Prize is MMCA and SBS Foundation’s flagship support program and award for Korean contemporary artists. Since 2012, it has selected four artists or teams each year, supporting the production and presentation of new work while sharing key questions and currents facing contemporary art.
The “prize” in Korea Artist Prize signifies formal recognition and public acknowledgment of artistic practice. At the same time, it evokes the forms created by art and the phenomena of an era revealed through art. Artists make visible the realities and problems we face and capture changes and movements that have not yet been fully explained. In this sense, Korea Artist Prize both honors artistic achievement and provides an occasion to consider what kind of world today’s art reveals and what it asks us to look at.
The selected artists for Korea Artist Prize 2026 are Haemin Lee, Jeongwoo Lee, Hyunsun Jeon, and Jinhwon Hong. Lee connects the material properties of objects and their embedded concepts through painterly action, attending to objects and landscapes that seem likely to disappear yet endure for a long time. Jeongwoo Lee traces errors, omissions, and biases produced by technological systems and investigates the conditions that make them possible. Hyunsun Jeon experiments with the structure and possibilities of painting, expanding it into multilayered forms that invite viewers to connect and experience images for themselves. Jinhwon Hong intervenes in the power relations surrounding images, raising fundamental questions about how sites of assembly and struggle are transformed into images.
Although the four artists use different media and methodologies, they do not accept the world as a completed order. Their works engage with what remains, what resists complete explanation, and what is still taking form. The exhibition follows the layers of relationships created as these forms and signs intersect, leaving questions open rather than offering finished answers.
