Cartoonist draws top prize at international exhibition

Jung In-kyeong, a Korean studying for a doctorate in cartooning in Japan, was chosen last week for the grand prize at the Sixth Kyoto International Cartoon Exhibition, where she will receive the prize next month.
Ms. Jung won the award for three cartoon cuts, which included a picture of a soldier taking his uniform off in front of a mural that resembles Picasso’s “Guernica,” an abstract image that represents a Spanish town ravaged by civil war.
“I think the judges thought my drawings were meaningful because they were about ordinary people obtaining energy in life from works of art,” Ms. Jung said. Another of her winning cartoons included a girl appreciating one of Rubens’s drawings.
“I am honored to receive a Japanese prize that even cartoonists of Japanese origin have not yet received,” she said.
Previous winners of the cartoon competition hailed mostly from Europe. For this year’s competition, 938 works were submitted from 51 countries. The judges unanimously selected Ms. Jung’s pictures as the prize winner.
After graduating from Sookmyung Women’s University in 1996, Ms. Jung went on to study cartooning at Kyoto Seika University in Japan, where she’s currently preparing her doctoral thesis on Picasso’s caricatures.
“I always loved drawing cartoons, but I thought I needed to study social sciences first to draw better,” she said. So she studied history as an undergraduate rather than major in cartoon-related studies.
“I would love to draw critical cartoons for newspapers as well,” she said.
Ms. Jung will add the most recent accolade at Kyoto to a host of others. She earned the grand prize at a cartoon exhibition commemorating the G8 Environment Ministers’ summit in 2000, and a silver prize at the 2002 Kyoto International Cartoon Exhibition.

by Lee Sang-eon