SUHANYA RAFFEL: M+ is Asia’s global museum of visual culture. It was the first of its kind in Asia and I think there will be many others that will follow. We are here to celebrate the Sigg Prize in its third edition, which really looks to the outstanding practices of artists from Greater China and its diaspora.

ULI SIGG: For a long time, my intention has been to bring talented artists to the attention of the general public in China. I intended to found this prize, at that time called the Chinese Contemporary Art Award, to bring important gatekeepers to the big Western exhibitions and institutions to China so that they would see Chinese contemporary art. In 2018, we transformed the Chinese Contemporary Art Award and transferred it to the M+ museum. It then was called the Sigg Prize as its new programme, which of course has more resources and can go further. I’m very glad to see that the Sigg Prize is now on a larger scale. With an international jury, prominent members, and more resources, we can do an exhibition of the art prize. I’m also very grateful to witness the successful journey of the winners—previous winners like Samson Young and Wang Tuo in 2019 and 2023 respectively—in making an international career influenced by receiving the Sigg Prize.

PAULINE YAO: So the exhibition is a very unusual kind of exhibition. It’s an award show, a prize exhibition. We have artists who work with very different materials and very different kinds of styles and aesthetics. Their departure points, what they’re thinking about, and what they’re sort of addressing in their work are very different. But our challenge for the show is we put them together in one space.

ARIADNE LONG: It’s a platform. A platform to acknowledge the diversity and the voices of our current time. A platform that can allow imagination to happen and is built on trust, and also a platform for different artists to show their strength and visibility.

HEIDI LAU: We are all already winners because we have this opportunity to develop a new body of work. That’s the most important thing, to be able to make new work for the audience.

HSU CHIA-WEI: (Mandarin) Because the Sigg Prize is held at M+, one significance of the award to me is the chance to truly collaborate with the M+ team. They had thorough discussions with each artist and helped develop our work. I think I was able to keep expanding on the themes I was exploring and present them more fully.

HO RUI AN: Being selected for the Sigg Prize exhibition has been an incredible honour. A lot of my work is rooted in the region, so to be a part of a prize that has a regional scope has meant a lot to me. So for me, with every artwork I make, I hope to shift the way that people see the world around them and to expand the way we talk about certain subjects.

BI RONGRONG: (Mandarin) To me, it feels more like a point in time that has continued to this day. I’ve made a lot of work, using my framework as a starting point, and created many smaller pieces. The Sigg Prize gave me an actual, tangible exhibition space where I could mount these fragments onto my framework and put them on display.

WONG PING: (Cantonese) This is about pushing the boundaries of my artistic practice. I’m not fully satisfied with video work that just sits on a screen. Of course, video is still my main medium, but this time I wanted to move towards theatre. I added lighting effects to match the video, similar to a stage for Cantonese opera or shadow puppetry, with fade-in, fade-out transitions between scenes. I think that has been one of my transformations.

SUHANYA RAFFEL: Let me explain to you how we select the finalists for the Sigg Prize. There are a group of nominators who are curators working in Greater China, who have expert knowledge, and they give us a long shortlist. The jury come together a year before the exhibition to shortlist a group of six artists from that longer list. Then we offer those six artists an exhibition. The jury then reconvene a year later to have a look at the exhibition, speak with the artists, and make a decision on who will be given that final award.

GONG YAN: (Mandarin) The Sigg Prize acts as a connection, a bridge, and a platform. In today’s complex political climate, the prize has a very important cultural mission and role. Rather than simply spotlighting artists who are already sought after on the international stage, it also pays attention to talented artists who haven’t yet been discovered. In each edition we see some new names, which are a pleasant surprise for all the jurors. More than that, we see a kind of cultural openness and inclusiveness, a mutual understanding that transcends culture and language.

GLENN LOWRY: The Sigg Prize, which is now in its third iteration, is really becoming one of those prizes that we all look forward to in the art world. I think one of the great values of the Sigg Prize is it not only brings a group of interesting scholars, curators, and thinkers together, but it also compels us to work through complicated questions about importance. I thought the discussions were incredibly valuable, I learned an enormous amount. It really creates a rich dialogue that’s all about networking, connecting, but much more importantly about thinking and learning.

SUHANYA RAFFEL: Working with a group of international colleagues as well brings us back to that discussion about museums in the world today, how we are networked, and how important it is to share our knowledge bases but also to take that knowledge into our various locations.

GLENN LOWRY: I couldn’t agree more. I mean, I think of what we do as institutions as providing platforms: platforms for artists to present their work, platforms for the public to think about art, to engage with artists, and to learn from artists, but also platforms for networking, collection sharing, idea and knowledge generation.

SUHANYA RAFFEL: I do think that our openness, our willingness to bring various publics in, has also meant that we are so much more open to these kinds of interventions that artists are making, whether it’s looking at AI, or how those kinds of technologies can be manifested in something very handmade.

GLENN LOWRY: Well, I think if there’s one thing the artists in this iteration of the Sigg Prize remind us about, it’s that there is hope, that you can tackle complicated political issues, you can tackle complicated social issues, but at the end of the day you have to believe in the power of art and of creativity to change us, to make us better, to help us understand the world in new and different ways. And I think each of these artists does that in their own way.

SUHANYA RAFFEL: What’s very important about the Sigg Prize is that we are profiling the next generation of contemporary artists from Greater China. But we also see that this is the future of contemporary art, and we think the art that’s being made in this region is a very important voice in the global scene. M+ was built as a twenty-first century institution, and we see this as an essential core part of the museum’s mission. We bring the future to all of the next generation of artists, audiences, maybe future makers who will feel inspired to become a Sigg Prize winner in a decade’s time. So the future of the prize is about encouragement, it’s about affirming and placing the work of artists from this region as equivalent and as important as their contemporaries in the rest of the world.