Hermes Korea Missulsang

Hermes Korea and Artsonje Center are, beginning this year, coorganizers of
the Hermes Korea Missulsang for Contemporary Korean Art. At the origin of the prize is
Hermes's desire to support the creation of young and upcoming Korean
artists, which is a perfect fit for Artsonje Center. Our collaboration is
natural, as is our passion for promoting artists who will become leaders in
the Korean art world. The first Hermes Korea Missulsang was in 2000. This, then, is the
fourth prize, for which, as coorganizers, we have considerably modified the
judging process. Until now, there was a one-step process whose prize winner
was chosen by a single jury. At the award ceremony for the year's winner,
the previous year's winner was given an exhibition. This year, however,
there was, for the first time, a two-jury award process in which an initial
group of five art world notables proposed ten candidates who were then
submitted to the scrutiny of a jury of three other art-word notables who
chose three finalists. The three finalists will now present new projects at
Artsonje Center, where, after scrutiny, the winner will be announced. We
hope that this new approach to the Hermes Korea Missulsang will be even fairer and
more transparent than in previous years.

The second jury, composed of Kang Seung-Wan, Kim Seungdeuk, Kim Airyung,
chose from the initial ten candidates three finalists: Suh Do-Ho, Yang
Hyegue, and Hong Seung-Hye. Suh lives and works in New York and has
received considerable recognition on the international art scene. His
remarkable visual language presents problems of groups and individuals in
modern society and shifting space. The artist Yang, who lives in Frankfurt,
has been working in both Europe and Asia. For the Hermes Korea Missulsnag, she proposes
a site-specific project that, through the spectator's participation in a
specific situation, represents the younger generation's nomadic lifestyle.
Finally, there is the artist Hong who, after seventeen years of study in
France, now lives and works in Korea. In her unique visual world she
creates, beginning with a traditional genre, a mechanical and artificial
painting with few elements and strict rules, and experiments with space and
flat surface, forms and signs, the visual and the recognizable.

The goal of Hermes Korea and Artsonje Center is to contribute, once a year,
to the development of contemporary Korean art through the discovery of young
Korean artists in a valid process and a quality exhibition. It would also
like its example of a prize, an exhibition, and a coorganization to serve as
a model of how art and cultural institutions working together with business
can help one another.

We would like to extend our thanks to those who have helped us to organize
this year's Hermes Korea Missulsang, especially the five members of the first jury: Yun
Nan-Ji, professor of art history at Ewha Women's University, Yun Dong-Gu,
professor at the Korean National University of Arts, Kim Young-Ho, collector
and president of the Ilsin group, Nicolas Bourriaud, codirector of the
Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, and Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of the 21st
Century Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kanazawa, Japan.