Jury’s Statement

For the last 20 years, the DOOSAN Yonkang Arts Awards have supported artists who have opened up different possibilities in contemporary art, anticipating their future work by providing them with new environments and time for creation. In this year’s judging, the discussion on the awards’ meaning and role went deeper than ever before. The conversation focused on what place the DOOSAN Yonkang Arts Awards hold that sets them apart from other award systems, what possibilities we should be looking at beyond the completeness and achievements of the artwork, and how the opportunities that residencies and solo exhibitions provide should support the next stages in the artists’ careers. Ultimately, the jury considered expectations for what the artists might show in the future to be an equally important standard to what they have accomplished to date. 

The recommended artists this year have exemplified more layered forms of practice than ever before. Representing a wide distribution of media and ages, they are all outstanding artists who have applied their own approaches to realize unique artistic visions. This made it all the more difficult to select a single recipient, and the discussions were quite lengthy, with different possibilities explored until the very end. In the end, the jury considered one crucial standard, namely which artist would be most strongly served for their future work by the opportunity provided with a residency and solo exhibition today. 

After great consideration, Ikjung Cho was chosen as that artist. Working in the media of performance, video, and installation, Cho has created art that adopts a storytelling format to explore the latent violence in society and individuals and the irrationalities within relationships. She has used narrative structures to recreate the perceptions associated with specific moments, activities, and personal experiences in daily life, expanding them into a broader form of social experience. Whether she is juxtaposing the stories of teenagers roaming along the riverside with landscapes from the Middle East or presenting a form of story theater set in a lab workshop for young people or the residential environs of an apartment, she has alternated among different times and places to transform personal memories and emotions into collective perceptions. 

Rather than attempting to create a specific event, Cho’s work uses physical movements, words, relationships, and rhythms to focus on the process of a story’s formation. Her characteristically trenchant observation skills and narrative construction capabilities present the viewer with concrete scenes that show the tensions and desires within youth culture, urban spaces, and communities. The artist has created a unique artistic vision that offers a sense of contemporary life. 

Cho’s experience giving birth to and raising a child over the past few years has resulted in changes to the rhythms of her process, but she has continued to explore forms of collaboration and symbiosis with other creations through running Windmill, a space for performance art, and she has resumed her creative efforts with works such as No Waist, which was recently shown at the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art. Rather than a mere resumption, the jury viewed this shift as signifying a new direction in the critical approach and formal experiments that the artist has engaged in to date. 

In particular, we hope the residency experience and solo exhibition will be an invaluable opportunity for Ikjung Cho to experiment in a broader context with the activities and story methods that she has explored for so long. We anticipate that this award will be a turning point in allowing the artist to take her body of work in an even deeper and broader direction, and we look forward to seeing what she shows in the years to come. 

Jury: Je Yun Moon, Park Gahee, Leeji Hong, Shinwon Hwang 

The 17th DOOSAN Yonkang Arts Award Brochure download(click)