GENIUS Olympiad 2025
World finals · Rochester, New York · Art category · Honorable Mention
In June 2025 I went to Rochester, New York, as one of Korea’s representatives in the Art category of GENIUS Olympiad, and came home with an Honorable Mention for my painting Ice Auction.
GENIUS Olympiad is an international competition for high school students about environmental issues. It was founded and is run by Terra Science and Education, and the 2025 world finals were held from June 9 to 13 at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Students bring projects in science, art, short film, music, robotics, entrepreneurship, speech, coding and AI, and every one of them has to say something about the environment. In the Art category, the work has to make people care about an environmental problem.
The work I brought
Ice Auction shows polar bears in formal clothes bidding for a single block of ice in a dark auction room. It came from two places: a documentary that showed me a starving polar bear instead of the cuddly one we all picture, and my interest in art auctions, where the price of rare things is pushed as high as it will go. If ice becomes scarce, could it be auctioned too? The bears wear yellow ties, the colour of hope, and I wore one myself when I presented.
Presenting it
In the Art category you present your own work: why you chose the issue, how the picture carries the message, and what you hope people will do after seeing it. I opened with the numbers behind the painting, the steady loss of Arctic sea ice, and then let the picture do the rest. Explaining the thinking behind an image to people who are seeing it for the first time, in a few minutes, is a skill of its own, and I learned a lot about it that week.
Honorable Mention
Hearing Ice Auction called for an Honorable Mention at an international finals is one of the moments I will remember longest. It told me that an idea I had worked out on my own, at my desk in Seoul, could reach people from completely different places.
What it showed me
The award mattered, but what stayed with me was the room. Students from many countries had each found their own way to say something about the same planet. A painting, a film, a business plan, a robot: each one was trying to change how someone feels or what they do.
That is the part of art I want to work in. Not only making the work, but thinking about who it is for, how it reaches them and what it can move. Business and arts management sit exactly there, and Rochester was the first time I saw that clearly.