Loewe Foundation Craft Prize: ‘Olympics of craft’ lands in Singapore

SINGAPORE – It was joy all around at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS) on May 12 as South Korean ceramicist Jongjin Park was awarded the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize for his caved-in porcelain sculpture.

The global prize, dubbed the Olympics of craft by artisans, was presented in South-east Asia for the first time, with a heavyweight panel – including Spanish fashion house Loewe’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, Mexican architect Frida Escobedo and Spanish industrial designer Patricia Urquiola – flown in for the occasion.

Outside the venue, fans waited for a glimpse of K-pop idol Giselle from girl group Aespa and Thai actors Baifern Pimchanok Luevisadpaibul, Phuwin Tangsakyuen and Tay Tawan Vihokratana, who were among the 400 people assembled.

This is the ninth edition of the annual prize, which has travelled to some of the world’s most famous cultural centres – Palais de Tokyo in Paris, The Noguchi Museum in New York, London’s Design Museum and the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid.

Now, Singapore joins the ranks.

The choice had ripple effects early on, eliciting a record 30 local submissions, Loewe Foundation president Sheila Loewe told The Straits Times ahead of the big night. “In other editions, we had one.”

The tropical outing was also a way of courting regional craft, a calculation that paid off in a higher-than-usual volume of South-east Asian applicants that mixed up a pool typically dominated by East Asia. These were very different works of ceramics, weaving, furniture and lacquer, added Ms Loewe.

South Korean craft artists swept six of the 30 spots on the shortlist, but home-grown bookbinder Adelene Koh made the cut, in a first since 2018.

It is something of a debut for the 43-year-old, who has only recently branched out from book restoration to making art objects. Discounting a prototype, her work, Endless, is the first paper sculpture she has made, said Koh.

Tiny “pages” are sewn around a wire coil with brightly coloured threads. The paradoxical result is a looping endband – the technical name for the pretty stitching on the tops and bottoms of hardcover spines – extended into an endless rhythm.

Peering at her compact work, one of the smallest on show at 120mm by 120mm by 55mm, one gets the sense she is an artist intrigued by minute beauty.

She said: “Endbands are one of the most decorative parts, but they’re very small and most people miss them.”

Koh is based in Tainan, Taiwan, where she studied for her master’s in conservation, a practice she likens to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

After four years in science, the dormant creative voice in her piped up, saying, “Hi, your hands need to work,” she added.

How quickly that instinct has paid off. Standing by her exhibited work at NGS, Koh could not keep the grin from her face. “This is like the Olympics of craft. I’m very proud to represent Singapore. It’s also a form of affirmation that this is the right path.

“I hope I will inspire more young Singaporeans to try something new because bookbinding is unheard of, and let them know craft is something you can pursue.”

A nod in competition can be life-changing, not just for the winner but for all 30 finalists who make it into the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize’s exhibition.

Pieces by them are wont to be acquired by museums such as London’s Victoria and Albert and shown in art fairs like leading craft event Collect, also in London, said Ms Loewe.

The work of Chinese artist Fanglu Lin, winner of the 2021 prize, was subsequently collected by the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, France, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.

Indian artist Sumakshi Singh, special mention honouree of 2025, has an installation at the ongoing 2026 Venice Biennale, which runs until November.

This is in part due to the prize’s conscious flirtation with contemporary art in its campaign to make craft new.

“We talk about craft with artistic ambition to the highest level,” said Ms Loewe. “In our exhibition, there are pieces that you could see in a contemporary art fair and also in a craft fair. It’s not easy, but we always say that we want to support a traditional craft that innovates.”

She highlighted the industrial aspect of a giant steel cone by finalist Jobe Burns, made from the same material used in tanks and shaped in a West Midlands factory. “We are open to new craft windows every year.”

Attention from curators of the world’s top museums has followed.

Mr Abraham Thomas, prize juror and curator of modern architecture, design and decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, said: “The whole group of 30 every year can be thought of as representative of how the contemporary craft field has changed.

“So, for me as a museum curator at the Met, where we have a really important craft and decorative arts collection, it’s a great way of getting a sense of the best work that’s happening out there.”

Appreciation of craft has changed significantly since Northern Irish fashion designer Jonathan Anderson, then creative director of Loewe, started the prize in 2016.

For one thing, the line between art and craft is beginning to blur. Juror Olivier Gabet, who is director of decorative arts at Paris’ Louvre Museum, said: “What is quite interesting today is that you feel that the world of art is completely into the technique of craft. At the Venice Biennale, I’ve seen so many pictures of textiles and ceramics. (At the same time), you feel huge aesthetic and artistic ambition from craftspeople. You see that the two worlds are overlapping.

“So for young people today, even more than for people 30 years ago, it’s completely relaxed and cool to say they want to work with textiles or ceramics. Whatever happens, ‘Is it an installation? Is it an object?’, it will be an artistic discovery.”

Alongside trends in art, keen amateur makers are taking workshops, while for the Loewe prize, visitor numbers to the annual exhibition have jumped from some 3,000 at the start to 30,000 now, a striding gain even accounting for growth due to the increased reputation of the prize.

Said Mr Gabet: “You feel a huge global consciousness about the presence of craft at the moment when we are surrounded by new technologies, which feels very chaotic, and we are going back to things which are really important for our cultural development.”

The prize has had particular success in Seoul, where the 2022 edition was held at the Seoul Museum of Craft Art.

It drew a huge turnout of young people for the specialist museum who then stayed for shows that followed, in effect creating a community interested in traditional skills at risk of erasure, said Ms Loewe – gesturing at the potential afterlife of the prize in host cities.

Its long-term impact in the South Korean capital might go some way in explaining the preponderance of K-representation at the prize.

The work that took the €50,000 (S$74,500) prize was Park’s Strata Of Illusion, an edifice of folded kitchen towels, piled up and coated with porcelain slip, then fired to incinerate its paper guts, leaving only a ceramic exoskeleton.

Its sunken front was a happy accident produced by the heat of the kiln, said Park, 44.

The judging panel included Kenya-born British ceramicist Magdalene Odundo, English writer and director emeritus of London’s Design Museum Deyan Sudjic, and Chinese Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Wang Shu.

In a statement, they said Park’s slumped sculpture was chosen for how it confounds expectations of what ceramics can be.

“There is a dialogue between the durability of the ceramic and the fragility and subtlety of his technique. The jury was so overwhelmed by the idea of noting something which is not a traditional approach to ceramics, yet shows a great mastery and a way to be risky,” said Mr Gabet.

Two special mentions worth €5,000 went to Ghanaian collective Baba Tree Master Weavers and Spanish designer Alvaro Catalan de Ocon for their joint elephant grass tapestry; and Italian jeweller Graziano Visintin, who decorated two necklaces made from fine sheets of gold with painterly strokes of niello, an ancient metalworking technique.

There were a few works that circled ideas of deformation, not least Park’s winning “misfire”.

Spanish artist Rafael Perez Fernandez fired porcelain blocks at 1,250 deg C in a gas kiln to force structural failure, splitting, cracking and creasing the material. Xanthe Somers from Zimbabwe punctured a colourful stoneware vessel, creating a dent in its shape, as if buckling from its own weight.

Allusions to birds also cropped up, most strikingly in German jewellery artist Dorothea Pruhl’s titanium birds strung together by a gold necklace, while South Korean furniture artist Somyeong Lee made four-legged “stools” in the manner of nests, by bending and binding thin strips of oak.

A bigger theme was material sleight of hand, with Lee’s wood passing for metal and elsewhere, linen threads passing for wire.

The 30 finalists, whose works are on display at NGS until June 14, were plucked from 5,100 entrants and hail from 133 countries – a signficant increase from the 1,900 submissions received in 2018, when the prize shortlisted its first Singaporean artist, Ashley Yeo.

Craft is growing in Singapore too, with the prize landing just as the National Heritage Board debuts the country’s first national pavilion at London Craft Week 2026. The work of 15 living local heritage practitioners are on show till May 17, marking the largest such expedition to date.

Singapore is as well awaiting its first design museum, and a national collection for items that fit is proceeding apace.

But for Koh, the deep work on endbands continues. “When I graduated, I bought myself a present, this book that has over 60 different endband techniques, written by a Greek conservator,” she said. “I’m going to try different types of endbands to see how they work and how they flow in the object.”