SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation was established by Mr. Yoo, Sung Yeon in 1989. The SongEun ArtAwards was established in 2001 to support and award Korean contemporary artists through a fair and transparent evaluation process every year. In this time 503 people applied for online preliminary round and 34 artists were selected for the final. Four finalists, Seo Kyeong Kang, Ji Eun Kim, Hye Soo Park and Hye Lim Cha, will judged based on 13th SongEun Art Award exhibition.

Seo Kyeong Kang has shown her work in two solo exhibitions recently. She collects objets losing original function or being inconsistent with current perspective or needs, and then recomposes them formatively and forms a new context. Recent work 'Grandmother Tower 1'(2013) evokes collision and tension with an unbalanced structure. The artist pursues 'paintallation' formed from the words 'painting' and 'installation,' an approach to a structure covering both plane and solid. In this exhibition, Kang considers a meaning of 'wait' an iron bell has and a story in relation to it through painting and installation.

Ji Eun Kim's work starts from exploring residential environment. She appreciates that urban space is made and managed by lots of regulations, and has worked as examining how policy can affect on forming environment. In this exhibition Kim focuses on a special space where is a familiar landscape we can see before a building completed, especially a history of city planning in Seoul. As shedding a new light on the crossed image between experiences of parents' and our generation, she suggests a new perspective on the city.

Hye Soo Park's new project 'definition of common' is about a research on a concept 'common', our society's minimum standard. The artist focuses on duplicity of 'common' and suggest how to see and apply a meaning of it as visualizing various standards and values.

Hye Lim Cha interprets and expresses a relationship between society and the individuals in own view. For the exhibition, the artist assembles different meanings and imaginations from different opinions and shows own story telling through painting. As observing innate possibility and unexpected variable with an organic mix of objet, installation, and painting, her art world and openended message can be found.

*image (left)
© Seo Kyeong Kang
courtesy of the artists and SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation