Sigg Prize 2023 希克獎2023
Sigg Prize 2023 希克獎2023
14 Jan 2024
Free entry
Sigg Prize 2023 showcases the works of six shortlisted artists for the award. Open to artists born or working in the Greater China region, the award recognises important artistic practices in the region and aims to highlight and promote diverse works on an international scale. This exhibition is the second edition of the prize, which will present a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Through the works, the artists demonstrate their unique visions and approaches to current urgent contemporary issues, fostering the cultural dialogues emerging from the region in response to a critical transitional period of the world.
The six shortlisted artists are Jes Fan (b. 1990, lives and works in New York and Hong Kong); Miao Ying (b. 1985, lives and works in New York); Wang Tuo (b. 1984, lives and works in Beijing); Xie Nanxing (b. 1970, lives and works in Beijing and Chengdu); Trevor Yeung (b. 1988, lives and works in Hong Kong); and Yu Ji (b. 1985, lives and works in Shanghai and New York).
On 4 January 2024, Wang Tuo was announced by the jury as the winner of the Sigg Prize 2023.
Prize Winner
Wang Tuo (b. 1984, Jilin) is based in Beijing. Working with various mediums including moving image, painting, and performance, Wang interweaves historical archives, mythology, and fiction into speculative narratives that blur the boundaries between time and space, reality and imagination. His practice is a powerful examination of modern Chinese and East Asian history, often exposing the underlying forces within society and disentangling the collective unconsciousness and historical traumas.
Portrait of Wang Tuo. Photo: Lok Cheng, M+, Hong Kong
Wang has had recent solo exhibitions at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art and Taikang Space in Beijing, and Present Company in New York. His works have been selected for recent group exhibitions in the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; Queens Museum, New York; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; and Times Museum, Guangzhou. In 2018, he was the winner of the Three Shadows Photography Award and the recipient of the Outstanding Art Exploration Award at the Beijing International Short Film Festival. He received the Youth Contemporary Art Wuzhen Award in 2019 and was awarded a research residency at KADIST San Francisco as part of the OCAT x KADIST Media Artist Prize 2020. Wang was the winner of the Sigg Prize in 2023.
Artwork presented at Sigg Prize 2023 Exhibition:
In The Northeast Tetralogy (2018–2021), Wang Tuo stages similar fates for his protagonists, who occupy different time periods across four chapters: Smoke and Fire (2018), Distorting Words (2019), Tungus (2021), and Wailing Requiem (2021). These four chapters blend historical and fictional events to offer perspectives on how we evaluate histories that seem to keep repeating.
Installation view of Wang Tuo’s The Northeast Tetralogy (2018–2021) at Sigg Prize 2023. M+ Council for New Art Fund, 2023. Photo: Dan Leung, M+, Hong Kong
Finalists
Jes Fan (b. 1990, Canada) is a Hong Kong- and Brooklyn-based artist who was raised in Hong Kong. He frequently employs organic materials and other components that invoke the body to explore the possibilities of nature and animacy. In his biomorphic forms and tactile sculptures, Fan juxtaposes the visual elements of human skin—something biological and living—with the cold and clinical instruments of a laboratory to evoke visceral responses from his viewers. Throughout his practice, Fan examines complex ideas of sexuality, gender, race, and species to challenge oppositional concepts and binary thinking.
Portrait of Jes Fan. Photo: Lok Cheng, M+, Hong Kong
Artwork presented at Sigg Prize 2023 Exhibition:
Jes Fan began the multi-chapter project Sites of Wounding in 2020, using concepts of non-human organisms and ecosystems to explore the relationship between species and kinship. In this presentation, Fan shows Sites of Wounding: Chapter 2 (2023) featuring Aquilaria sinensis, an endangered incense tree native to Hong Kong. Also known as agarwood, it is prized for its fragrant resin produced only around sites of violence, like an area of fungal infestation or trauma.
Installation view of Jes Fan’s Sites of Wounding: Chapter 2 (2023) at Sigg Prize 2023. Collection of the artist. Commissioned by M+, 2023. Photo: Dan Leung, M+, Hong Kong
Miao Ying (b. 1985, Shanghai) is a new media artist based in New York and Shanghai. She is known for projects and works that address Chinese internet culture—a complex and hyperregulated realm, which she calls the ‘Chinternet’. Her recent practice incorporates machine learning live simulation and often takes the forms of websites and installations to explore technology and its impacts on our daily lives, while highlighting new modes of politics, aesthetics, and consciousness created by representation of reality through technology.
Portrait of Miao Ying. Photo: Lok Cheng, M+, Hong Kong
Artwork presented at Sigg Prize 2023 Exhibition:
Miao Ying creates virtual simulations and installations that explore technology’s impact on our daily life. This presentation features Pilgrimage into Walden XII, a three-chapter live simulation of a future human world governed by artificial intelligence (AI). A medieval fantasy land built on Walden XII, a game engine, the simulation uses a system that makes every rendering a unique outcome with machine learning.
Installation view of Miao Ying’s Pilgrimage into Walden XII, Chapter I: The Honor of Shepherds (2019–2020), collection of the artist; Pilgrimage into Walden XII, Chapter II: Surplus Intelligence (2021–2022), commissioned by Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; and Pilgrimage into Walden XII, Chapter III: Battle for Glorious Magic (2023) at Sigg Prize 2023, commissioned by M+. Photo: Dan Leung, M+, Hong Kong
Xie Nanxing (b.1970, Sichuan) currently splits his time between Beijing and Chengdu. He is a radical experimental painter who challenges the traditions and conventions of painting taught within art schools. He is interested in psychology and often turns to investigative psychology to question the true nature of things in his practice.
Portrait of Xie Nanxing. Photo: Lok Cheng, M+, Hong Kong
Artwork presented at Sigg Prize 2023 Exhibition:
Xie Nanxing’s paintings deliberately avoid clearly defined styles and symbolic elements to focus on creating a visual experience. His recent triptych painting The Ballad of Pieter Picking His Teeth (2022) draws from his socially restricted life during the pandemic. Seen together, the three abstractions express Xie’s pandemic-induced malaise and dissatisfaction with the world’s environmental neglect.
Installation view of Xie Nanxing’s The Ballad of Pieter Picking His Teeth (2022) at Sigg Prize 2023. Collection of the artist. Photo: Dan Leung, M+, Hong Kong
Trevor Yeung (b. 1988, Guangdong) lives and works in Hong Kong. His art excavates the inner logic of human relations. Fascinated by botanic ecology and horticulture, Yeung features carefully staged objects, photographs, animals, and plants in his mixed media works as aesthetic pretexts to address notions of artificial nature. These delicate and ironic arrangements allow him to exert control over living beings, including plants and animals, as well as his audiences.
Portrait of Trevor Yeung. Photo: Lok Cheng, M+, Hong Kong
He often projects emotional and intellectual scenarios onto living substitutes in his work, translating his own social experiences into elaborate fables through which he continues to explore failure and imperfection. Yeung ultimately questions how closed systems contain and create emotional and behavioural conditions.
Artwork presented at Sigg Prize 2023 Exhibition:
Inspired by his experience of crossing borders at the height of the pandemic, Trevor Yeung made The Queue (2023), which, together with four other works, recreates the isolation and anxiety of quarantine. Under the ‘red brighter’ poster, we follow the stanchions and wait for our turn to enter the ‘hotel room’. Inside the room, a money tree is tied and restrained, while passing daylight outside the window is marked with pencil sketches and tea stains on paper. There is a dual sense of being watched and cared for, comparable to the brief and dispensable life of a caged hamster. At the end, participants return to the gallery in the reassuring company of a night light. The work conveys Yeung’s practice of capturing the nuances of human emotion in shifting surroundings.
Installation view of Trevor Yeung’s The Queue (2023) at Sigg Prize 2023, commissioned by M+, 2023. Photo: Dan Leung, M+, Hong Kong
Installation view of Trevor Yeung’s Wall of a Hamster Cage (Mira Moon) (2022), courtesy of Blindspot Gallery; Mr. Cuddles in a Hotel Room (2023) at Sigg Prize 2023, commissioned by M+, 2023. Photo: Dan Leung, M+, Hong Kong
Yu Ji (b. 1985, Shanghai) creates installations, videos, and performances that take medium and materiality as starting points to create her own visual language with a rich vocabulary rooted in form, objects, humanity, and the everyday. Whether featuring a cast of a limb or the outline of a body part, the sculptures at the heart of Yu’s practice are amorphous anatomical objects, sensitive yet weighty, evoking an almost eerie sense of mechanical disengagement, as if a human body has been created and then pilfered.
Portrait of Yu Ji. Photo: Lok Cheng, M+, Hong Kong
Yu is a skilled narrator of complex relationships—between people and things, life and death, and the present and the past. Encountering Yu’s work is a physical experience that sparks memories and ineffable associations. Her creations also prompt viewers to revisit the relationship between space, body, and time, reminding them of their own historicity.
Artwork presented at Sigg Prize 2023 Exhibition:
Yu Ji often uses industrial materials such as concrete and steel to examine the impact of the social environment on individual existence. Made of concrete, her works in this presentation are fragmented body parts restrained in a steel web, tied up, or still encased in their moulds. A large, rib-shaped hammock hangs nearby, concealing locally collected industrial debris. The forms of these sculptures originate from Yu’s continuous study of the muscles of athletes engaged in extreme sports as well as her long-standing fieldwork and archival research on ancient Asian sculptures. Yu observed eroded and damaged works that have weathered centuries of change. Four independent sculptures of varying sizes present a collective imagination of the many faces of modern urban dwellers, registering their fatigue and struggle.
Installation view of Yu Ji’s Jaded Ribs (2019), courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ; Flesh in Stone – The Moving Feast No.2 (2020) at Sigg Prize 2023, courtesy of Y.D.C.. Photo: Dan Leung, M+, Hong Kong
Members of the Jury
- Maria Balshaw (Director, Tate, United Kingdom)*
- Polly Staple (Director of Collection, British Art, Tate, United Kingdom)*
- Bernard Blistène (Honorary director of Musée national d’art moderne- Centre Pompidou, Paris)
- Gong Yan (Director, Power Station of Art, Shanghai)
- Glenn D. Lowry (Director, Museum of Modern Art, New York)*
- Stuart Comer (The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, Museum of Modern Art, New York)*
- Suhanya Raffel (Museum Director, M+, Hong Kong)
- Dr Uli Sigg (collector and member of the M+ Board, Switzerland)
- Xu Bing (artist, Beijing)
*Polly Staple and Stuart Comer served in place of Maria Balshaw and Glenn D. Lowry respectively for the second Jury meeting.
Nominating Committee:
- Freya Chou (curator, Taipei and Hong Kong)
- Li Qi (curator and art critic, Shanghai)
- Magdalena Magiera (curator and researcher, Singapore)
- Sun Dongdong (curator, Beijing)
- Yang Zi (curator and researcher, Beijing)
- Anthony Yung (researcher and curator, Hong Kong)
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Image at top: Wang Tuo's Northeast Tetralogy (2018–2021) at Sigg Prize 2023 exhibition. Photo: Dan Leung, M+, Hong Kong
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