YoungEun Kim Awarded 2026 ACC Future Prize
57Nov. 5, 2025
The Gwangju-based National Asian Culture Center (ACC) has named interdisciplinary artist YoungEun Kim the winner of theACC Future Prize. Established in 2023, the biennial prize is given in recognition of next-gen multidisciplinary artists working at the intersection of art, media, and technology to explore notions of futurity and transformation. Kim will receive funding and support—including production and media studios, digital media infrastructure, and a dedicated production team—toward the creation of new work in advance of a solo exhibition at ACC Creation Space 1 in Gwangju, running from August 2026 to January 2027.
Born in Seoul in 1980, Kim studied sculpture and media art at Hongik University and Korea National University of Arts, Seoul, earning her BFA from the former and her MFA from the latter, before completing a sonology program at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. She is currently working on her PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Kim explores social and historical themes including modernization, militarism, and migration through a practice encompassing sound, video, and installation art. Emblematic of her work are the 2025 video installationListening Guests, which investigates the relationships diasporic communities form with listening through language, music, and various aural events in daily life; and the 2022 workEar Training, which examines the collision of aesthetic education with Korea’s military history via simulated pitch-perception exercises designed in Japan during the country’s occupation of Korea, in which students and those in the armed forces were made to listen to the drone of army planes and notate what sounds they heard.
“[Kim] reconstructs speeches and writings produced in diaspora, migration, and border contexts through recitation and reading, transforming listening into a reflective act,” wrote the prize jury in a statement. “Her project poses essential questions: ‘What have we failed to hear? And how should we ethically confront that which remains unheard?’ This initiative reinterprets colonization, history, and memory through sound art and aims to foster new meditative practices of listening in contemporary art.”
Kim is the second artist to nab the prize, after Ayoung Kim, who was named the inaugural winner in 2024.