Art Awards Hail Up And Coming Artists
By Seo Dong-shin
Staff Reporter
The luxury retail brand Hermes Korea has established itself as a Maecenas of local contemporary art over the years, with an appreciative eye as well as generosity.
Since 2000, the ``Hermes Missulsang,'' which means Hermes art award in Korean, has been annually presenting rising contemporary artists with a 20 million won prize. The list of award recipients now features a crop of the most successful young artists in the nation, including Kim Beom of 2001, Suh Do-ho of 2003, and Lim Min-ouk of the last year.
The works of three artists competing for the award this year will go on display from Saturday at Atelier Hermes, an art gallery inside the gilded building of Maison Hermes Dosan Park in Sinsa-dong, southern Seoul.
Hermes Korea funded each of the candidate's projects, who were announced in March. The new works will be unveiled for the first time in the exhibition.
This year's chosen artists are Kim Sung-hwan, 33, Lee Joo-yo, 37, and Sasa[44], 36.
Kim is known for playing with ideas through works that link performance and video, while Lee produces trademark objects and drawings that many would deem as being unfinished.
Sasa[44], meanwhile, has a reputation for his display of obsessively collected items _ which critics hail as ``unique'' in Korean society, which has ignored the task of collection and recording, in a culture obsessed with rapid development and pursuit of the new.
The winner will be announced on Oct. 19, after a screening by a panel consisting of local and international curators and art experts. Those interested can visit the exhibition at Atelier Hermes; the show will run until Oct. 23.
Song Eun Arts and Cultural Foundation also revealed the recipients of its annual art awards this week. The grand prize, which comes with 20 million won, went to Jung Sang-hyun, 36, who submitted a video piece titled ``Spreaded Blue Room.'' Three 10 millions won commendation prizes went to Park Hong-soon's offbeat landscape photographs of Han River, ``Paradise in Seoul,'' Suh Yoon-hee's atmospheric Korean painting ``Memory Gap-108'' and Choi Hae-ri's surreal oil painting ``Windy Stairs/Over the Windy Stairs.''
The foundation will hold an exhibition displaying the 46 works that made into the final round of the screening at the Insa Art Center from Sept. 5 to 11.
``Competitions cannot judge artistic achievement. And as always, there is criticism toward artists who win awards at competitions,'' said Kim Jong-gil, an art critic and curator at the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art. ``Winning at a competition managed by a fair and strict screening is an important way to support the artistic achievement.''