Artist Hong Jin-hwon has won the Korea Artist Prize 2026, the annual award for contemporary Korean artists organised by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and the SBS Foundation. The announcement was made on Wednesday, October 28, following a final closed-door evaluation after a discussion between the four sponsored artists and the jury.

Hong, a former foreign news correspondent, works in photography, video and web programming to explore how images shape social and political power. His practice begins with the protests and scenes of struggle he witnessed as a reporter, and he juxtaposes different images and sounds to expose the power relations operating within them. His new work for the prize exhibition is a single-channel video running 32 minutes and 50 seconds.

Charmaine Toh, acting senior curator at Tate Modern and a member of the judging panel, praised Hong's work for revealing the tension between social practices and their representation, and for questioning the visual systems through which people perceive reality. The prize, running since 2012, supports four artists or teams each year with funding to produce and exhibit new work and to take part in international projects.

The other sponsored artists this year are Lee Jung-woo, Lee Hai Min Sun and Jeon Hyun-sun, whose works are shown alongside Hong's in a four-artist exhibition at MMCA Seoul that runs from July 24 to December 6, 2026. The award places Hong in a lineage of Korean artists whose work has used the museum's national platform to address the politics of the image itself.