Korean artist Oum Jeongsoon (b.1961) has won the the inaugural Park Seo-Bo Art Prize at the opening ceremony of this year’s Gwangju Biennale, titled soft and weak like water. The $100,000 award is sponsored by the GIZI Foundation that manages the works of painter Park Seo-Bo.
Oum was selected by a jury of five, including Frances Morris, Director of Tate Modern; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea); Mami Kataoka, Director of the Mori Art Museum; Yun Bummo, Director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; and Yoon Jae-gap, independent curator.
Oum’s selected large-scale fabric installation Elephant without Trunk (2023) derived from a previous project that retraced a fifteenth-century elephant’s long journey from Indonesia to Korea’s Jangdo island via Japan. For the installation, Oum reinterpreted the animal through the auditory, olfactory and tactile experiences of people with visual impairments, as a way to reveal the existences that are often made invisible in the realm of normality.
