FRIEZE 2025 Korea Artist Prize 2025: Revealing unseen through sound, myth and AI
An installation that forms part of Im Young-zoo's "Go (The Late)" (2023-25) is seen as part of the group exhibition "Korea Artist Prize 2025" at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. Newsis
From works that distill the fraught histories of diasporic communities into resonant soundscapes to an “empty tomb” where visitors brush against the threshold between life and death, four finalists animate the “Korea Artist Prize 2025” exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul.
Since 2012, the annual prize, co-organized by the MMCA and the SBS Foundation, has championed contemporary visionaries, selecting four individuals or collectives who bring fresh currents into Korean art. Each receives 50 million won ($36,000) to develop new pieces for the show.
This year’s finalists are Kim Young-eun, Im Young-zoo, Kim Ji-pyeong and Unmake Lab. Working across sound, the classical vocabulary of Korean painting, superstition and artificial intelligence (AI), they each strive to illuminate the unseen and the invisible and highlight experiences omitted and forgotten within dominant narratives.
From left, Choi Binna and Song Soo-yon (Unmake Lab), Kim Ji-pyeong, Kim Young-eun and Im Young-zoo, the four finalists for this year's Korea Artist Prize, pose during a press preview at the MMCA, Thursday. Newsis
Kim Young-eun has long explored how overlooked ambient sounds — from the nightly curfew siren that echoed across Korea until 1982 to a fragile wax cylinder recording of a Korean folk song from the end of the 19th century — can reveal erased strands of cultural and political history.
In “To Future Listeners III,” she digitally transforms a wax cylinder recording of an early 20th century Irish immigrant song in the U.S., originally sung by a man, into a choral arrangement of female voices.
Installation view of Kim Young-eun's presentation at the MMCA / Yonhap
“No audio traces remain of Irish immigrant women in that era. By turning a solitary male voice into a chorus of women, I sought to reimagine the presence of those whose lives were scarcely documented in official histories,” she explained.
In “Listening Guests,” she makes visible how the very act of listening to language and music is entangled with diasporic life, drawing on interviews with the Korean community in Los Angeles and with Koryoin, the diasporic Koreans from post-Soviet states.
Installation view of Im Young-zoo's "Go (The Late)" (2023-25) / Courtesy of MMCA
Im’s practice delves into traditions and superstitions that have been carried through time.
At the MMCA, she transforms an entire gallery into an immersive empty tomb titled “Go (The Late),” inspired by the Korean custom of building a false, temporary grave in the absence of a body.
Though no body lies within, the space is filled with video projections and installations that invite visitors to wander, recline and crouch, tasting the surreal contours of an afterlife.
“I imagined the audience as human children, birds in flight and even ghosts,” the artist noted.
Kim Ji-pyeong's "Polyphonic Chorus" (2023-25) / Newsis
Kim Ji-pyeong subverts the classical concepts and techniques associated with Asian traditional painting, treating it as a platform for open, evolving narratives.
In “Polyphonic Chorus,” she turns figures long pushed to the margins of society, including jesters, shamans and grandmothers, into kaleidoscopic folding screens. “Cosmic Turtle” reimagines the violently severed communion between civilization and nature, inspired by a 2018 news report of a sea turtle found with piles of Korean propaganda leaflets in its stomach.
Installation view of Unmake Lab's presentation at the MMCA / Yonhap
Unmake Lab, the duo of Choi Binna and Song Soo-yon, questions the human-centered frameworks of perception that AI only makes more stark. Using generative neural networks and datasets, the two explore the rupture between AI’s projections of the future and lived reality, as witnessed in the speculative, fever-dream of “New-Village.”
The “Korea Artist Prize 2025” exhibition runs through Feb. 1, 2026, with the prizewinner to be announced in January. The selected artist will receive an additional 10 million won in support.