Winners announced for Southeast Asian digital art prize; architect Rafael Moneo to be honoured at Venice; curator Meg Onli receives Figure Skating award
The winners of the inaugural Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize have been announced. The digital art award launched with an open call to Southeast Asian artists, aged 18 to 40. In the still image category, Shwe Wutt Hmon (Myanmar) took the first prize, with Robert Zhao (Singapore) and Fajar Riyanto (Indonesia) claiming the second and third prizes respectively. In the moving image category, first prize was awarded to Mark Chua & Lam Li-Shuen (Singapore), with Khiev Kanel (Cambodia) and Arief Budiman (Indonesia) taking the second and third prizes respectively. The jurors included Barbara Staubli, Curator of The Julius Baer Art Collection in Switzerland; Dr. Wiyu Wahono, a collector based in Indonesia; Dr. Cheryl Loh, a collector based in Singapore; gallerist Audrey Yeo, of Yeo Workshop in Singapore; and Manila-based curator Inti Guerrero. A virtual exhibition of the finalists will be on view until 30 June.
Rafael Moneo, the Spanish architect and educator, has been named the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement by the Venice Architecture Biennale – Moneo will be presented with the award during the biennale’s 17th edition which opens to the public on 22 May. ‘As a practitioner, and through his broad array of buildings, he has highlighted the ability of every architectural project to respond to contingencies of site and program while transcending them’, biennale curator Hashim Sarkis said. ‘As a scholar, he has combined his visual prowess and analytic rigours to help reinterpret some of the most canonical historic buildings with fresh eyes.’
Meg Onli, the Andrea B. LaPorte Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, has been awarded the inaugural Figure Skating Prize – a USD$75,000 award created by the organisation Figure Skating (founded in 2019 by Virgil Abloh, Mahfuz Sultan and Chloe Wayne) which recognises a Black artist, curator or contemporary art scholar engaged with racial justice in the arts. ‘We wanted to award this first prize to a curator that was researching colonialist foundation of museums,’ Abloh commented. ‘It’s important for us to recognise and give praise to Black female curators who are shining a light on this work and building bridges in the Black community.’
