Sigg Prize 2023 exhibition

EVENT DESCRIPTION

M+ is pleased to present the Sigg Prize 2023 exhibition. The exhibition will open to public free of charge from Saturday, 23 September 2023 at the Main Hall Gallery.

Established by M+ in 2018, the Sigg Prize was formerly the Chinese Contemporary Art Award, founded by Dr Uli Sigg in China in 1998. The Sigg Prize is a biennial award recognising important artistic practices in Greater China. Open to artists born or working in the region, it aims to highlight and promote diverse works on an international scale.

The Sigg Prize 2023 exhibition brings together works by six shortlisted artists: Jes Fan, Miao Ying, Wang Tuo, Xie Nanxing, Trevor Yeung, and Yu Ji. Their presentations touch on pertinent issues and contemporary topics of everyday life, which include responses to the disruption bought on by the COVID-19 global pandemic. With their takes on cultural kinship, Jes Fan and Trevor Yeung highlight experiences of isolation and interior trauma, which are closely tied to changes in social and institutional systems. Xie Nanxing and Yu Ji look for balance between vulnerability and resilience through their painting and sculptural practices. Drawn to the interconnection of past, present, and future, Wang Tuo and Miao Ying explore ways to evaluate history and the contemporary moment.

Jes Fan’s multi-chapter project Sites of Wounding uses concepts of non-human organisms and ecosystems to explore the relationship between species and kinship. In Sites of Wounding: Chapter 2 (2023), Fan creates a video featuring agarwood, an endangered incense tree native to Hong Kong. He traces agarwood’s connection to the city, once a trading hub for incense, while untangling the roots of Hong Kong’s name, which translates into ‘fragrant harbour’.

Miao Ying’s Pilgrimage into Walden XII (2019–2023) is a three-chapter live simulation of a future human world governed by artificial intelligence. 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.

In Wang Tuo’s film project The Northeast Tetralogy (2018–2021), he stages similar fates for his protagonists, who occupy different time periods across four chapters. These films blend historical and fictional events to offer perspectives on how we evaluate histories that seem to keep repeating.

Living a socially restricted life during the pandemic, Xie Nanxing created a triptych painting conveying humour and the absurd. The Ballad of Pieter Picking His Teeth (2022) expresses Xie’s pandemic-induced malaise and dissatisfaction with the world’s environmental neglect.

Inspired by the experience of crossing borders at the height of the pandemic, Trevor Yeung created a set of works, including The Queue (2023), recalling the isolation and anxiety many have undergone while in quarantine. This presentation conveys Yeung’s practice of capturing the nuances of human emotion through shifting surroundings and his own experience.

Yu Ji often uses industrial materials such as concrete and steel to examine the impact of the social environment on individual existence. In her presentation, Jaded Ribs (2019) is a large, rib-shaped hammock concealing locally collected industrial debris. Other sculptures from her Flesh in Stone series look like fragmented body parts depicting the many faces of modern urban dwellers and their fatigue and struggle.