There is something interesting about an exhibition that started last week at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA)’s Seoul branch in central Seoul. For the sixth year in a row, the four artists nominated for the prestigious “Korea Artist Prize,” granted by the museum and the SBS Foundation, have set up a show to display the best of their work. But this year’s edition looks like a well designed group exhibition under a specific theme rather than a competition. This year’s finalists are Bek Hyunjin, Sunny Kim, Kelvin Kyungkun Park and Song Sanghee. All of them are quite different from one another in style and the medium that they use. But their works can be linked to create a story about the realities of Korean society as perceived by individuals. The show starts with Kim’s paintings, which depict landscapes with bodies of water such as lakes and waterfalls or girls in school uniforms. Although the paintings have no surrealist elements, they give off a feeling of magic realism, as their low chroma colors give off a calm and dreamy atmosphere. The artist said during a press preview last Tuesday that the paintings are based on her vague emotions about what she might have missed in her motherland after emigrating to the United States in her youth. At a solo show in Seoul last year, she told the Korea JoongAng Daily that her paintings are not of her experiences, “so they have the sense of floating.”