NEW GEN: The Emerging Voices
The Korean Cultural Centre UK (KCCUK) is delighted to announce NEW GEN: The Emerging Voices, the latest edition of its annual open call programme supporting Korean artists based in the UK. This year’s exhibition presents eight artists whose works span painting, sculpture, moving image, and installation, exploring the complex relationships between identity, materiality, and the contemporary condition.
Selected by a distinguished panel comprising Daphne Chu (Curator, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham), Alvin Li (Curator, International Art, supported by Asymmetry Art Foundation, Tate Modern), and Yung Ma (Senior Curator, Hayward Gallery, London), the exhibition highlights the breadth and depth of emerging Korean artistic practice today. The committee’s expertise reflects a broad international perspective, ensuring a dynamic dialogue between the UK and Korea’s contemporary art scenes.
The featured artists collectively navigate the intersections of myth, memory, ecology, and both materiality and technology, reflecting on how individual experience and collective history entangle together. Heeyoung Noh explores the lingering presence of trauma and tenderness within domestic life, while Woojin Joo draws from folklore and shamanistic motifs to reveal how mythic imagination continues to shape the everyday. Yumin Lee reflects on survival and emotion within the cycles of capitalism and digital mediation, and Soohyun Choi probes the fragile boundaries of authenticity and authority within the art system, exposing how preservation and contamination are entangled in the institutional structures that define artistic value. Sangbum Ahn investigates ecological and technological entanglements, revealing how progress and collapse coexist within the same system, and Jo Jae reconsiders perception and sensibility under technological acceleration, proposing new ways of seeing and feeling in the present. Jihoon Cho and Woojin Jeon both examine materiality as a site of adaptation and care, transforming instability and tension into gestures of endurance and renewal.
Together, their works compose an ecosystem of voices that illuminate the sensibilities of a new generation - reflective, and deeply attuned to the shifting realities of our time. Through this exhibition, the KCCUK continues its commitment to nurturing emerging artists and fostering cross-cultural dialogue within the UK art landscape.
For further press information and a selection of press images about the exhibition, please contact Jaemin Cha, Curator of the KCCUK on jaemin.cha@kccuk.org.uk
Quotes
“New Gen’s emotional power represents a new aesthetics of creativity that does not consume emotion but unlocks soul. All that is called is love. All that is unlocked is Art. Art is not merely an expression of emotion, but its living practice.” - Dr. Seunghye Sun
“Serving on the selection panel has been a wonderful opportunity to engage with a range of artists whose practices are nuanced and deeply considered. The submissions reflect a remarkable variety of approaches from material experimentation, conceptual inquiries, to explorations in form and subject.” - Daphne Chu
“The selection this year represents a diverse and exciting pool of emerging voices, both in form and in content. They go from the concrete to the abstract and digital, from the whimsical to the prophetic, giving us glimpses of what to expect from the next wave of Korean art.” - Yung Ma
“The artists gathered here reveal how Korean contemporary art finds new resonance across contexts - building bridges between cultures, and shaping a living language that continues to evolve within the UK’s artistic landscape.” - Jaemin Cha