The Doosan Yonkang Foundation announced on October 18 that this year’s Doosan Yonkang Art Award in the fine arts category went to Heemin Chung (b. 1987). Playwright and play director Lee Hong-do won the performance category of the art award.

Each winner will be awarded 30 million KRW in prize money. In addition, Heemin Chung will receive 80 million KRW in support of the opening of an exhibition, round-trip airfare, and accommodation costs for staying abroad, and the performance category winner receives funding support of 150 million KRW for a new play production.

The Doosan Yonkang Foundation appoints three judges in the visual arts section to recommend three candidates under the age of 40. This year, artists in their late 20s to their late 30s who work in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, installation, video, sound, and media, were on the candidate list. 

Nominees were those who touch on issues and work with materials that are central to the current contemporary art world, such as sculpting, painting in the post-internet era, discussing post-humanity, and experimenting with time and sound as data. To select the winner through a fair and impartial screening process, the judges went through a couple of review processes in which they shared the reasons for recommending the candidates and exchanged opinions on the candidates to come to an agreement.

Numerous art institutions have already recognized Heemin Chung’s works. Nonetheless, the foundation explained that Chung, as an emerging artist who has mainly worked in South Korea, has great potential to broaden her perspective as an artist by participating in an external artist residency program outside the country, which the foundation will fund as part of the award.

Chung was recognized not only for the consistency of her artistic practice but also for her experiments in expanding it. After starting her career as an artist in 2015, Chung has been investigating how the prevalence of mobile and mechanical devices in the digital age has altered our perception of images.

Chung creates a digital image using a computer program and transfers it to the canvas in the form of layers and fragments of texture. Her works center on painting, but she expands the genre by transforming the canvas frame, adding multiple canvases, and combining different images with videos and VR.

“Among other artists who also touch on the issues of the production, distribution, and consumption of contemporary images, Chung stands out for her works that delve deeply into the contemporary senses surrounding the post-internet era with a balance between the in-depth study of the genre of painting,” explained the foundation.

Chung has held solo exhibitions at P21 (Seoul, 2022, 2019), Museum Head (Seoul, 2021), Kumho Museum of Art (Seoul, 2018), and Project Space Sarubia (Seoul, 2016). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the 2022 Busan Biennale, SeMA Nam Seoul Museum, Gyeonggi Museum of Art, One and J. Gallery, Boan 1942, Audio Visual Pavilion, Platform L, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, and Hite Collection.

The Doosan Yonkang Art Award was established in 2010, the 100th anniversary of Yonkang’s birth, in accordance with the will of Doosan’s first chairman, Doosan Park Doo-byeong, who emphasized the value of talent. A total of 40 people (teams) have been awarded the Doosan Yonkang Art Award as of 2022.

References

• 두산아트센터(Doosan Art Center), [두산아트센터] 두산연강재단 두산아트센터, ‘제13회 두산연강예술상’ 시상식 개최, 2022.10.19