Winners of Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech 2023

Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing announced two winning exhibitions for the Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech 2023 on December 16 2022: Jianghong Chen and Zheng Li’s The Animal Farm Simulator and Xiao Zong’s Metamorphic Ecosphere.

Launched in 2017, Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech is an annual award program developed by Hyundai Motor to recognize and foster a new generation of Chinese creative curators through a wide range of professional support activities, including providing the grand winners with the opportunity to showcase their curatorial works at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing. Every year, a new theme is announced, aiming to inspire emerging Chinese curators to creatively and critically reflect on the most pressing issues of our time and to engage the public in a broader dialogue based on the winning exhibitions.

Focusing on the theme “Decentralized Reworlding” for the year 2023, participants were required to creatively envision how to rebuild our decentralized life from the perspectives of art, technology, and the humanities. Among the five groups shortlisted in August 2022, Jianghong Chen and Zheng Li’s The Animal Farm Simulator and Xiao Zong’s Metamorphic Ecosphere were selected by jurors, media professionals, and the public.

Jianghong Chen is a creative planner and design researcher. Zheng Li is a curator, researcher of social innovation projects for children, and fashion designer. Their exhibition The Animal Farm Simulator is a bold and philosophical reflection on how to build a new ecology through co-creation, cooperation, and the sharing of their future-oriented curatorial practice. In an imaginative animism era, everything in nature is believed to have a soul, and when non-anthropocentrism becomes the norm, farms become the most important unit of production on a global scale. In their selected works, the curators build a “farm simulator,” a future experimental field where humans and animals co-exist, presenting the entire farm biosphere as a network system that is composed of brain neurons connected by supergroup synergy and mutation.

As a curator based in Shanghai, Xiao Zong has a strong interest in the impact of technology on socio-economic structures and ecological structures. In her exhibition Metamorphic Ecosphere, Xiao Zong explores, imagines, and reflects on alternative social, economic, and environmental structures from a non-human perspective in order to accept the “invasion” of other species and embrace a symbiotic or coexistent system between humans and non-humans. The exhibition encourages us to apply “Metamorphosis” to transform ourselves and contemplate our relationship with other species. Apart from opposition and competition, we also have transformation, transposition, diffusion, and interdependence. Metamorphosis facilitates interspecies communication, which lays the groundwork for genuine decentralization.

“The Hyundai Blue Prize 2023 is to encourage creative and critical forms of reworlding through the arts, technology, and the humanities in order to ensure humanity’s continued existence,” said DooEun Choi, Hyundai Motor’s Art Director. “The Prize will continue to activate art so as to spark dialogues about potential actions for our shared future.”

As grand winners, Jianghong Chen, Zheng Li, and Xiao Zong are invited to curate their exhibitions at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing in 2023, with a grant of 600,000 yuan for each exhibition. Their exhibitions will follow those of the two grand winners of the Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech 2022. Additionally, they will be further supported in exhibition promotion and extended public programs.

Since its establishment, the Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech has remained true to its original aspiration of building a platform to support curators with innovative and critical minds while fostering a global discussion concerning our shared future. Over the years, the award program has developed into an important incubator for a great variety of cutting-edge topics, particularly the interaction of art and technology.