The finalists of the inaugural edition of HUGO BOSS ASIA ART are:
Birdhead (Shanghai), Hsu Chiawei (Taipei), Hu Xiangqian (Beijing), Kwan Sheungchi (Hong Kong), Lee Kit (Hong Kong), Li Liao (Shenzhen), Li Wei (Beijing)
The HUGO BOSS ASIA ART, a new biennial award initiated by HUGO BOSS and Rockbund Art Museum, takes special focus on contemporary art in Asia to think, invent and represent the social, economical and cultural changes of Asia in a post-global era. Following the HUGO BOSS PRIZE co-founded in 1996 by HUGO BOSS and the Guggenheim Foundation, this groundbreaking biennial award for artists in Asia is conceived and administrated by the Rockbund Art Museum. The Award carries a stipend of RMB 300,000.
The inaugural edition of this prestigious award recognizes the works of Chinese emerging contemporary artists and will feature finalists in a group exhibition from which a winner will be selected. Meanwhile, HUGO BOSS ASIA ART activates an ongoing research platform remapping the contemporary art in Asia with symposia, dialogues, lectures and publications.
HUGO BOSS ASIA ART aims to support emerging contemporary artists. Emerging artists are those who are in the early stage of their artistic creation and exhibition practices, question, extend and enrich the possibilities of contemporary art. They do not only deconstruct established codes of art, but fully take the risk of offering unexpected forms, experiences and meanings into the process of making and seeing the picture. Emerging artists in Asia could be closely connected to the specificities of their artistic, social and cultural contexts, but it is the way they express these specificities into a strong, fresh, powerful, critical and emotional visual experience that will make these emerging artists relevant for the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART.
HUGO BOSS ASIA ART considers Asia as a construction and as a question to investigate rather than a monolithic area and fixed identities, and decisive social, economical and cultural mutations in Asia generate and request constant re-mapping of the contemporary arts. Further more, economical and cultural growths in Asia are based on different models and diverse contexts which deserve to be specifically analyzed. In the age of post globalization, the interrelations between the commonplace and the singular should cultivate diversity and contradiction as the basis of our representations of reality.
HUGO BOSS ASIA ART is launched in the context of China and inaugurated from the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. The inaugural 2013 HUGO BOSS ASIA ART is devoted to emerging artists originated from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Rockbund Art Museum will constitute, for each edition, an independent jury composed of independent curators, museum directors, art critics and artists who have been fully involved in and contributed to the evolution of contemporary arts in Asia and internationally.
“HUGO BOSS ASIA ART chooses to promote art as a fundamental critical space for debating the future of contemporary art in both local and international scopes. We argue that art is above all a practice for disensus rather than consensus, on the basis of which cultural exchanges and learning process can be forged: creating space for discussion, stimulating thought, and imagining symbols, allegories and all the other intrinsic metaphors of cultural creativity and social dynamism,” Mr. Larys Frogier, Chair of the jury of HUGO BOSS ASIA ART and the Director of Rockbund Art Museum, stated.
Finalists exhibition
13 September–8 December 2013
Winner announcement:
31 October 2013
Rockbund Art Museum
No.20 Huqiu Road
Shanghai, China
www.rockbundartmuseum.org