Four Korea Artist Prize finalists turn cracks in history and painting into a major MMCA art feature

The Korea Artist Prize, the biggest award handed out by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), has bestowed its 2026 edition on four artists who share no medium or theme: a painter of things barely holding on, a media artist feeding a censored 1946 film through generative AI, a painter who builds canvases into a climbing wall and hangs one with its back to the room, and a protest photographer who stopped taking pictures.

These works are being shown at the Korea Artist Prize exhibition at the MMCA Seoul branch from Friday, and the final winner of the prize is set to be announced in October.

The prize was founded in 2012 with the SBS Foundation, an offshoot of an Artist of the Year program that ran from 1995. Eight panelists name two artists each; 16 become eight, eight become four, and an international jury — meeting over video across time zones — argues the last cut past midnight.

“The discussion on the winners of the prize runs to one, two in the morning; that’s how fiercely they argue,” said Park Deok-sun, the curator behind this year’s edition, at a press conference at the MMCA Seoul on Thursday. What the jury weighs is “originality, and how far the work can still expand,” according to Park.

Each of the four finalists gets 50 million won ($34,100) as a prize. The ultimate winner, named in late October after a public conversation with the jury and a closed second round, takes another 10 million won and a documentary dedicated to them.

There is no theme among the four finalists this year, but a disposition. The four “don’t see the order of the world as something finished,” Park said. “They watch the small cracks inside it very closely, and make them visible in their own colors.”

“Korean art’s position and role in the global art world have been growing,” said MMCA director Kim Sung-hee. “The people who matter most in making sure this doesn’t end as a passing interest — in building a Korean art scene with sustainable competitiveness — are the artists. This exhibition will confirm the possibilities of Korean art.”

Kim promised that the museum will keep supporting mid-career and younger artists working beyond Korea.

Of the four finalists for this year’s edition, Lee Hai Min Sun paints what is left once something has mostly gone. “Lingering Snow” (2026) starts from a technical fact: photographic paper cannot print white, so snow is present in the image and absent from the print. She leaves the blank where the snow should be and paints around it: dust, stain, the marks of melting. “Outside” (2026) does the same for a tarpaulin thrown over a site as a stopgap and still there years on.

Lee Jung-woo, next up on the finalists’ list, went looking for a film that no longer exists. “Hurrah for Freedom” (1946), the first Korean independence feature made after liberation, was cut apart after its director’s record as a Japanese collaborator surfaced and its lead defected to North Korea. About 50 minutes of the film survive, the hero’s face mostly gone.

Lee’s “In Writing ‘Hurrah for Freedom: Cinema and History” (2026) rebuilds the missing footage with generative AI, and the reconstruction censors itself in turn: the model read “long live freedom” of the original film as propaganda and refused to work with it, returned a Western man when asked for a 1946 independence fighter, and declined blood on a woman’s chest until he asked for ketchup.

“A system that promises to generate anything still cannot restore history,” curator Park explained of Lee’s work. “In 2026, AI can't make this piece; the same prompt returns different values now.”

Third finalist Jeon Hyun-sun, a Jean-Francois Prat Prize finalist in 2024, has spent years pushing painting off the wall. “Even Rabbits Dig a Second Burrow” (2026) assembles 32-meter (105-foot) canvases into a face six meters high and 20 meters wide, tilted 15 degrees toward the viewer; what the work looks like at a distance as a pixel grid is watercolor, laid down dot by dot.

Fourth finalist Hong Jin-hwon photographed protests professionally as a photojournalist, until, in curator Park’s account, “the substance of the event evaporated and only the sensational image circulated.”

“The Highest Form of the Image Is Armed Struggle” (2026) takes the 1971 Japanese Red Army–PFLP declaration, swaps propaganda for image, and lays it over Korean rallies that now come with a stage, a director and slogans written for the cameras. Two videos, “Dark Adaptation” (2026) and “Light Adaptation” (2026), come at the same question from opposite ends: what visibility deletes.

Asked whether the prize is a platform for early-career artists or a survey of experimental practice, the MMCA organizers and curators clarified that the museum worked that out after the prize’s 10th year, with outside advisers.

“Once you’re running an award, it’s hard to make it a curated exhibition as well; the two don’t really sit together,” said Song Su-jong, senior curator at the MMCA. “But we decided to keep the award, because we don’t want it to be a competition. We want it to be a platform where artists can present their work without any limits or conditions.”

The case for the Korea Artist Prize is the alums: whatever any one year decides, the artists who come through the prize are the ones carrying Korean contemporary art, argued Song and Park.

The Korea Artist Prize exhibition runs until Dec. 6 at the MMCA Seoul. Admission is 2,000 won.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]