Dongwan Hong (MFA 2020) was awarded the Keister & Allen Art Purchase Prize at the Arts & Humanities 2020 Graduate Exhibition. The award, which is granted to a second-year MFA candidate, supports the purchase of a work for the collection of the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.

Hong was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. Influenced by his mother, who has an art educational degree, he developed an interest in art at a young age. He got his B.F.A. and M.F.A. in Sculpture at Seoul National University. While at university, Dongwan got interested in wooden sculpture, and while using his own hands to create the sculptures, he learned the importance of the process of art-making. Later on, with the continuous study on Conceptual Art and Institutional Critique, he converted labor, often neglected in art, into the primary value of art-making, and focused on the labor conducted in life as well. Hong is the author of his thesis, A Search for the Condition of Art-making – on ‘Artist, Labor, and Exhibition Space,’ 2017.

After working at an art high school in the sculpture department in Goyang, Korea, he moved to the U.S. for his second M.F.A. in Art Studio at UC Davis. 

The purchase prize is made through an endowment fund established by Shaun Keister, vice chancellor of the UC Davis Office of Development and Alumni Relations, and Walter Allen, a business analyst in the client services unit of UC Davis Information and Educational Technology.

Dongwan Hong’s final exhibition can be viewed at the Manetti Shrem Museum’s virtual exhibition.