Kim Youngkyung & Seong Eui-seok, School of Visual Arts, Selected by the 15^th KT&G SKOPF as the Photographers of the Year

Kim Youngkyung and Seong Eui-seok, who major in Photography in the Department of Fine Arts, were selected as the Photographers of the Year designated by the 15^th KT&G Sangsangmadang Korean Photographer's Fellowship (SKOPF).

The KT&G SKOPF discovers and assists 3 young prospective photographers of the year who will lead the trends in photography. Kim and Seong, who became this year’s winners after the screening of the professional jury, attained 5 million KRW funds and a 1 million KRW artistic activity fee, mentoring opportunities, and admission to participate in the 2025 group exhibitions.

With Kim Jiwon, the other winner of the year, all three will be revealed to the public and professionals in arts and culture at the year's end. The final “Best Photographer of the Year” selected after the portfolio review will be granted an additional 500 million KRW funds, 300 million KRW of exhibition preparation fee, and 100 million KRW of activity support along with assistance for publishing a collection and hosting a solo exhibit at the KT&G Sangsangmadang Gallery.

Shim Hye-young, jury of the 15^th KT&G SKOPF, stated in the commentary, “Kim Yougkyung interprets the reality of diminishing and changing rural life in various aspects, ranging from photographs of straight landscape to images with industrial technologies applied. Seong Eui-seok experiments with the correlation between the will to create and technical coincidence by combining developed images with Photoshop images through AI Prompt Port to produce unpredicted images.”

Kim Youngkyung pays attention to the dwindling time and the ways to record it. Kim won the Mirae Artist Awards in 2015. She held a solo exhibition, “Notice of Commencement,” in which a collision among the recording media is reinterpreted into a new narrative, with a series of works created from 2019 to 2020. For group exhibitions, Kim took part in “Free Speech” (Jeonju Contemporary Museum of Art, Jeonju, 2023), “Circuit Breaker” (Saegonggan, Seoul, 2023), “Deepwater Fish in Shallow Water” (Motiforoom, Seoul, 2023), and more.

Seong Eui-seok focuses on incidents and phenomena taking place in cities and makes documentary images of them. Seong held solo exhibitions, “Scroll” (Human Resource Market, Seoul, 2023) and “Temporary Parking” (Offerscent, Seoul, 2020), and group exhibitions, “Paint it Black” (Amado Art Space, Seoul, 2024), “From Now to Now” (Ulsan Contemporary Art Festival, Ulsan, 2022), “Special Exhibition” (Oil Tank Culture Park, Seoul, 2020), and “Fictions” (Ways of Seeing, Seoul, 2013).