KWON Hayoun

KWON Hayoun (b. 1981) is a media artist whose practice explores memory, history, and testimony through contemporary technological media, including animation, documentary film, 3D graphics, virtual reality (VR), and game engines. Working at the forefront of emerging technologies, she investigates the possibilities of new visual languages while examining the tensions and gaps that exist between individual memory and collective history. KWON’s works often begin with questions surrounding historical events and shared social memories. Through interviews and testimonies gathered from individuals who directly experienced these events, she constructs narratives in which reality and fiction, documentation and imagination, fact and memory intersect. The events represented in her works occupy a space between objective history and subjective experience, inviting viewers to encounter moments where accepted historical narratives collide with personal recollections and alternative testimonies. While the spaces, temporalities, and narratives within her works are grounded in real events and archival materials, viewers are guided through carefully designed experiential pathways that resist singular interpretations. Rather than arriving at a definitive truth, audiences are confronted with multiple, often conflicting memories and perspectives. In this process, memory emerges not as a fixed record of the past but as a continually reconstructed experience of the present, where the stories of others gradually become intertwined with one’s own perceptions and recollections. KWON employs advanced technologies not merely as tools of representation, but as means of visualizing the invisible layers of memory and testimony and recovering individual experiences embedded within larger historical narratives. Her works encourage viewers to reconsider the meaning of history and memory at the intersection of objectivity and subjectivity, reality and virtuality, and collective and personal remembrance.

KWON has presented solo exhibitions at Leeum Museum of Art (2023, Seoul, Korea), ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI (2019, Shanghai, China), Doosan Gallery New York (2018, 2019, New York, USA), Galerie Sator (2018, Paris, France), Palais de Tokyo (2017, Paris, France), and the Centre d’Art et de Photographie de Lectoure (2016, Lectoure, France), among others. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at major international institutions including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (2024, 2023, 2021, 2017, Seoul, Korea), Seoul Museum of Art (2024, 2018, Seoul, Korea), Philadelphia Museum of Art (2023, Philadelphia, USA), Ulsan Museum of Art (2025, 2022, Ulsan, Korea), Asia Culture Center (2023, 2022, Gwangju, Korea), Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (2022, 2020, Busan, Korea), Ilmin Museum of Art (2020, 2019, Seoul, Korea), Centre Pompidou (2020, Paris, France), Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2019, Paris, France), Nikolaj Kunsthal (2019, Copenhagen, Denmark), Daegu Art Museum (2023, 2019, Daegu, Korea), The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (2017, New York, USA), and Art Sonje Center (2015, Seoul, Korea). In 2024, Kwon was selected as a finalist for the Korea Artist Prize, jointly organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Her accolades include the Special Jury Prize in the Immersive Competition at SXSW (2026), an Award of Distinction in Computer Animation at Prix Ars Electronica (2018), awards at IndieLisboa International Film Festival (Portugal, 2017), Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (Romania, 2017), Palais de Tokyo’s Emerging Artist Prize (France, 2015), the European Media Art Festival (Germany, 2014), and the International Documentary, Short and Animated Film Festival (Russia, 2014), among numerous others. Her works are held in the collections of Centre Pompidou, the National Center for Visual Arts (CNAP), Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and the Kadist Art Foundation in France; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in the United States; as well as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoseoul Museum of Art, Daegu Art Museum, Busan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, and the ARARIO Collection in Korea.