Cover ‘The Sound of Sinking’ (2025) at Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition (Photo: courtesy of Dan Leung and M+, Hong Kong)
‘The Sound of Sinking’ (2025) at Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition (Photo: courtesy of Dan Leung and M+, Hong Kong)
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A mechanical spider, underwater cello music and a golf course inside a museum: this year’s Sigg Prize finalists confront urgent questions shaping the contemporary world.
The Sigg Prize has rapidly become one of the most closely watched accolades in Asian contemporary art. Established in 2018, the biennial award recognises outstanding practices emerging from the Greater China region and its diasporas, spotlighting artists whose contributions shape cultural conversations across borders. This year’s edition at Hong Kong’s visual culture museum M+, supported by Cathay, brought together six finalists working across sculpture, moving image, sound, digital media and performance, on view from September 6, 2025 through January 4, 2026.
What emerged was a generational snapshot: six artists, all born in the 1980s and 1990s, tackling questions of memory, history and technology from wildly different vantage points, yet often circling back to shared concerns about how narratives are built—and how they dissolve.
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Above The installation view of the Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition, 2025 (Photo: courtesy of Lok Cheng and M+, Hong Kong)
The installation view of the Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition, 2025 (Photo: courtesy of Lok Cheng and M+, Hong Kong)
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Bi Rongrong anchored the exhibition with To Connect, To Cut, To Draw (2025), a monumental textile installation weaving together oracle bone script and ancient motifs from multiple continents. Her work evoked both the persistence and fragility of cultural forms across time. By contrast, Ho Rui An staged a meditation on power and artificial intelligence. His two-channel installation Figures of History and the Grounds of Intelligence (2024), paired with his new commissioned timeline A History of Intelligence in ((South)(East)) Asia (2025), combined lecture performance and real-time AI imagery, interrogating the politics of images in Southeast Asia’s colonial and postcolonial histories.
History was also at the centre of Hsu Chia-Wei’s The Sound of Sinking (2025). Using VR, sonar data and folk song, Hsu charted the intersections of regional history and collective memory through shipwrecks in the Taiwan Strait, turning the gallery into a haunting archaeoscape of sound and vision. Heidi Lau shifted the register to the mythological: her ceramic assemblage Pavilion Procession (2025) conjured hybrid beings inspired by the classical Chinese text Shanhaijing, layered with grief, spirituality and the liminal space between worlds.
Above ‘Debts in the Wind’ (2025) at Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition (Photo: courtesy of Lok Cheng and M+, Hong Kong)
‘Debts in the Wind’ (2025) at Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition (Photo: courtesy of Lok Cheng and M+, Hong Kong)
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Pan Daijing extended her ongoing explorations of sound and performance with Bent (2025), a site-specific choreography of steel, screens, light and voice that blurred the boundaries between viewer and work, body and environment to heighten the viewer’s awareness of their sensations. Finally, Wong Ping once again proved himself a master of satire with Debts in the Wind (2025), an animated narrative set in a toy-like playhouse that folded comedy, desire, violence and absence into one mischievous package.
The finalists were chosen by an international jury panel, which includes Suhanya Raffel, the museum director of M+; Maria Balshaw, the director of London’s Tate; Gong Yan, the director of Shanghai’s Power Station of Art; Mami Kataoka, the director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum; Glenn D Lowry, the David Rockefeller director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Uli Sigg, Swiss art collector and member of the M+ Board; and Beijing artist Xu Bing.
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Above ‘Pavilion Procession’ (2025) at Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition (Photo: courtesy of Dan Leung and M+, Hong Kong)
‘Pavilion Procession’ (2025) at Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition (Photo: courtesy of Dan Leung and M+, Hong Kong)
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Ariadne Long, associate curator of visual art at M+, said at a press conference on September 4 that the main differences between this year’s edition and the previous two lie in the age and subject matter of the artists. “All of them were born in the 1980s and 1990s. They are the youngest shortlisted group in the history of the Sigg Prize,” she said. “The mediums and themes they engage with are also diverse and complex. They range from traditional materials such as ceramics and textiles to advanced technologies like AI, mixed reality and virtual reality. You can see the enormous potential and complexity reflected in each artist’s work.”
“This year marks an exciting moment, with all six finalists presenting their recent and newly commissioned works in person for the first time,” Raffel adds in a press statement. “The Sigg Prize will remain a vital force in spotlighting the region’s most compelling voices and shaping the future of Asian visual culture.”
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Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
