Winners of the 2018 Hyundai Blue Prize Announced
By Dennis Mao
WEI YING (left) has been named winner of the
It was announced on November 7 that curator Wei Ying has won the Creativity Prize of the 2018 Hyundai Blue Prize, while artist and curator Long Xingru received the Sustainability Prize. The award recognizes emerging Chinese curators. They will each be granted RMB 600,000 (USD 87,000) by Hyundai to realize an exhibition, together with the opportunity to travel between international art institutions as part of research trips. The award ceremony took place on the day of the announcement at Beijing’s 798 arts district.
The 2018 competition was focused on the mediation between innovation and art, which was reflected in the awardee’s careers. After attaining her masters degree in biology at Fudan University, Wei turned her attention to contemporary art, establishing the bio-art space Pan-bioart Studio in 2016. She has also served as a researcher at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and curator at Yuz Museum, Shanghai. “The subjects of artworks [. . .] are no longer constricted to human-related topics [. . .] this hybridity and emergency of new social concerns require artists and curators to have sharper insights and more comprehensive capabilities when considering what exhibitions are,” Wei said in response to the theme of this year’s Prize.
Long is an emerging multidisciplinary practitioner who uses art to illustrate the relationship between technology and humanity. She has previously been featured in “Data·Image·Détournement” (2018) at Shenyang’s GESSOISLAND and the second “CAFAM Future” exhibition titled “Observer-Creator – The Reality Representation of Chinese Young Art” (2015) at 798 Art Factory and CAFA Art Museum, Beijing. Long argued that art and technology will both lose their impact if they are isolated from each other.
The awardees were selected for the “creative energy” in their curatorial proposals by public online voters, media representatives, as well as artists and critics including Qiu Zhijie, Karen Smith and Elaine W. Ng, editor and publisher of ArtAsiaPacific. The other finalists of this year’s award include Taikang Space curator Chelsea Liu Qianxi and Wang Weiwei, who co-curated the 2018 Shanghai Biennale, as well as duo Li Beiliang and Sun Tianyi, and Yao Mengxi.
Dennis Mao is an editorial intern of ArtAsiaPacific.
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