November 6, 2019
Larys Frogier, Director of the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), Chair of the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Jury, and Jerome Bachasson, Managing Director of HUGO BOSS Greater CHINA, announced that Eisa Jocson has been awarded the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award for Emerging Asian Artists 2019. Eisa Jocson, who was selected from a shortlist comprising Hao Jingban (Mainland China), Hsu Che-Yu (Taiwan) and Thảo-Nguyên Phan (Vietnam), will receive a stipend of RMB 300,000. The works of all four finalist artists are displayed at RAM from October 18, 2019 to January 5, 2020.
Larys Frogier said: “With the precious contribution of the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART 2019 nominators and jury members, we are extremely honored and proud to present the award to Eisa Jocson from Philippines, Manila. As a female artist conceiving stunning and always unexpected art projects from performance to sound and visual installations, Eisa Jocson has already a unique position in the contemporary art scenes in Asia and globally. The artist creates multilayered images, revisiting the vocabularies of dance and music, as well as infiltrating local popular references and contemporary visual art formats. It is with great intelligence that Eisa Jocson engages today’s life and art, always repositioning her own practice into the unknown, going beyond fixed identities, genders and frontiers.”
“We sincerely congratulate Eisa Jocson for winning the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award 2019. It is wonderful to see how the project provides a platform for your artists and their work,” stated Dr. Hjördis Kettenbach, Head of Cultural Affairs at HUGO BOSS. “Our gratitude also goes out to the jury and the Rockbund Art Museum for their dedication to this project.”
The winning artist
Eisa Jocson was born in 1986 in Manila, Philippines. She is a choreographer, dancer, and visual artist based in Manila. As a visual artist with previous training in ballet, a key concern in her art is public performance work, such as in the service and entertainment industries. In representations of the Phillippine body, Jocson often explores how the body challenges its own malleability, and how it adapts to different social environments and economic relationships. She takes a deep look at the effects of conditioning and limitations on the body through societal conventions, forms of economic migrant labor or through the myths that perpetuate definitions of how movements or gestures should be performed or expressed by people from widely different social groups.
About the public programs
A series of public and education activities including performances, workshops, lectures and walk & talk will be held alongside the Award to further explore the intellectual and social contribution of the finalist artists. Parallel to the exhibition, the public and educational programs make up another platform of the Award that is committed to exploring and presenting different artistic and social contexts in present-day Greater China and Southeast Asia. This will extend, complement and enrich the topics generated by the finalist artists while connecting with the general public. The exhibition of works by the four finalists of HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award 2019 runs through to January 5, 2020, curated by Billy Tang, Senior Curator of Rockbund Art Museum. For the duration of the exhibition, audiences will be able to enjoy the augmented reality guided tour with the curator on mobile devices.
For more information, please visit: hugobossasiaart.org/en/
