Artist Hong Jin-hwan has been named the final winner of the Artist of the Year 2026, co-hosted by the SBS Cultural Foundation and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA).

A former foreign correspondent, Hong has explored the socio-political power relations inherent in the creation and distribution of images using various media such as photography, video, and web programming.

He has particularly focused on the process by which sites of rallies and struggles are transformed into single images, presenting works that juxtapose different images and sounds.

His submitted work, "The Ultimate Form of an Image is Armed Struggle," crosses the language of past revolutions with today's protest sites to examine how scenes of resistance are transformed into predictable and controllable images.

In his new work, "In Fact, the Milky Way is a Ghost," he explores the relationship between absence and silence, memory and gazing by connecting photographs capturing places where tragedies have passed with the research of Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek.

The jury evaluated that Hong's work reveals the tension between social practice and image representation, raising questions about existing visual systems used to perceive reality.

They also praised his work for persuasively demonstrating how images convey social events while newly constructing their meanings by crossing images and records from different eras and contexts.

The Artist of the Year award is an artist support program jointly operated by the SBS Cultural Foundation and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art since 2012, selecting four artists or teams each year to support the production of new works and exhibitions.

As the final winner, Hong Jin-hwan has been selected as the 2026 Artist of the Year and will receive an additional grant of 10 million won.

Works by this year's selected artists—including Hong Jin-hwan, Lee Ha-min-sun, Lee Jung-woo, and Jeon Hyun-sun—can be viewed at MMCA Seoul until December 6.

(Photo: Provided by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Yonhap News)