New Gen: The Emerging Voices

The Korean Cultural Centre UK (KCCUK) is delighted to present the exhibition 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 introduces eight artists whose practices span painting, sculpture, moving image, and installation, exploring how identity, materiality, and technology shape contemporary experience.

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 diversity and depth of emerging Korean artistic practice today. The committee’s international expertise ensures a dynamic dialogue between the UK and Korea’s contemporary art scenes.

Collectively, the artists navigate the intersections of myth, memory, ecology, and digital culture, reflecting on how personal experience and collective history intertwine. 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 cycles of capitalism and digital mediation, and Soohyun Choi examines fragile systems of authorship, ownership, and artistic value that underpin the art market.

Sangbum Ahn investigates ecological and technological entanglements, revealing how progress and collapse coexist within the same system. Jo Jae reconsiders perception and sensibility under technological acceleration, translating digital conditions into material and spatial forms that propose new ways of seeing and feeling. Jihoon Cho and Woojin Jeon explore materiality as a site of adaptation and care, transforming instability and tension into gestures of endurance and renewal.

Together, their works form an ecosystem of ideas—experimental, reflective, and deeply attuned to the shifting realities of our time. NEW GEN: The Emerging Voices not only showcases the vitality of Korean artists working across the UK but also invites audiences to encounter new approaches to making and meaning in the contemporary moment.

Artists:

• Heeyoung Noh
• Woojin Joo
• Jo Jae
• Woojin Jeon
• Soohyun Choi
• Yumin Lee
• Jihoon Cho
• Sangbum Ahn