Hong Jin-hwon wins the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) Artist of the Year 2026 award

[Financial News] Hong Jin-hwon, who has explored the social and political power relations embedded in images, has been selected as the final winner of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea’s Artist of the Year 2026 award.
According to MMCA on the 29th, the museum and the SBS Foundation selected the winner in a closed final judging after holding public conversations during the exhibition and a roundtable with visitor participation on the 27th.
A former foreign correspondent, Hong Jin-hwon has examined how sites of demonstrations and struggles are represented as images through various media, including photography, video, and web programming. By juxtaposing different images and sounds, he reveals the power relations at work within them.
In the documentary Melting Icecream (2021), he addressed questions of image and memory by tracing the remnants of archival footage of the democratization movement damaged by flooding. The work received the Beautiful Goose Award at the 14th DMZ International Documentary Film Festival (DMZ Docs) in 2022.
A new work in this exhibition, The Highest Form of the Image Is Armed Struggle (2026), interweaves the language of past revolutions with scenes of demonstrations today. Combining ballet footage from the Cultural Revolution, interviews with demonstration organizers, reinterpreted people’s songs and gestures, and other material, it examines how sites of resistance are transformed into images that can be predicted and controlled.
Another new work, Exactly Speaking, the Milky Way Is a Phantom (2026), connects landscape photographs of places where tragedy has passed with research images by Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek. Through the absence and silence left in tranquil landscapes, it explores the relationship between looking and memory.
Jury member Charmaine Toh, acting head of curatorial at Tate Modern, said, “Hong Jin-hwon’s work reveals the tension between social practice and the process through which it is represented as images, and raises questions about the visual systems through which we see and understand reality.”
Artist of the Year is an artist support and awards program jointly run by MMCA and the SBS Foundation since 2012. Each year, it offers four artists or teams the opportunity to create new work and exhibit it. Hong Jin-hwon will receive the 50 million won grant provided to supported artists, plus an additional 10 million won in funding as the final winner.
The exhibition featuring Lee Hae-min-seon, Lee Jeong-u, Jeon Hyeon-seon, and Hong Jin-hwon runs through December 6 in Galleries 1 and 2 at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, in Jongno District, Seoul. Admission is 2,000 won.

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