The youngest group of nominees yet evince our changing relationships with new technologies and the futures they promise
Awarded biennially, the Sigg Prize and accompanying exhibition of work by the shortlisted artists highlights practitioners from the greater China region and its diasporas, providing glimpses of the topical trends, cultural issues and events that inform their work. This year’s nominees are Pan Daijing, Wong Ping, Hsu Chia-Wei, Heidi Lau and Ho Rui An, Bi Rongrong – all of whom were born during the 1980s and 90s, making them the youngest group to be nominated yet.
Although seemingly disparate, their practices do share common threads. Hsu, Lau and Bi put a twist on traditional materials, while referencing folklore and mythology. And all nominees are notable for an unexpected use of and commentary on new technologies, and for reexamining the present and its implications for the future.
On entering the museum, visitors see Macao-born and -bred, New York-based Lau’s Pavilion Procession (2025) from above. Morphed vessels appear to be melting and take on a primordial, living aesthetic, seemingly writhing and entangled. A string of these – the sculptor’s signature ceramics – hangs from the ceiling like a floating pagoda marking the entrance to a room in the basement Studio space, filled with more of these creations, which are placed on a low, altarlike platform.
Here, Lau creates her own Shanhai jing miniverse – afoundational circa-fourth-century BCE Chinese text, known in English as the Classic of Mountains and Seas. In the text, the spiritual, fantastical and magical fuse with reality, featuring numerous invented hybrid creatures that inspire Lau’s creations. Lau literally grounds the magical and spiritual in her ceramics, speaking to the connection between the earthly and the divine. This is only intensified by the sense of ritual that accompanies the experience as visitors follow a processional, circumambulatory path around the altar to fully view the sculptures.
Lau’s raw, almost crude take on a traditional medium, combined with folkloric conceptual inspiration, is bolstered by the presence of a robotic spider – her first tryst with technology in her work, and alluding to a futuristic hybrid creature. Situated in the middle of the altar and blending in among the vessels, the ceramic spider occasionally moves in a jerky manner, startling audiences.
Meanwhile, tech is thoroughly incorporated in Taiwanese artist Hsu Chia-Wei’s The Sound of Sinking (2025), in the form of VR and acoustic archaeology – the use of sonar technology to assess archaeological material and sites. Specifically, the tech converts sound waves – many of which are inaudible to the human ear – into spatial information. The work is the result of a seven-year research project, during which Hsu collaborated with archaeologists using and developing archaeo-acoustics. In it the artist takes shipwrecks in the Taiwan Strait dating from the First Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War as his subject matter. The sounds of a discordant cello and underwater rumblings accompany the film, which features divers swimming around the sunken ships and appearing to play string instruments to the tune of experimental music. In presenting alternative dimension of historical events, the work posits another way of understanding established narratives, potentially challenging the way history is traditionally recorded.
Technology takes another bend in Singaporean Ho Rui An’s two-channel video-installation Figures of History and the Grounds of Intelligence (2024), beside which and hanging on a wall is an accompanying text-based diagram titled A History of Intelligence in ((South)(East)) Asia (2025). One screen depicts Ho’s lecture performance: he speaks about how governments have utilised technology for surveillance since the Cold War and features images from across a broad spectrum of cultural content – from elections in Singapore during the 1950s to clips from the film Edge of Tomorrow (2014). The other screen shows AI-generated footage reacting to the lecture in real time. As a whole, the work challenges how AI models learn from history, without context or critical understanding, and mindlessly generate a transformed narrative.
Putting humans back at the centre of the narrative, Berlin based Pan Daijing’s Bent (2025) is a sensory installation that makes viewers ultra-aware of their bodies and existence. Pan is a composer and musician, and has no formal training as a visual artist. Curtained off in one corner of the gallery, her installation invites viewers into a dark, secluded space where a newly edited video documents footage from old performance pieces, mainly featuring dancers enacting slow choreography.
A deep throbbing bass can be heard reverberating throughout the installation. Seemingly in response to the gallery’s architecture, a small ladder is attached to a window located above the installation; looking up at it feels as though you might have just descended the ladder into the existential black hole that is the exhibition. Far more experiential than any other work on view, it’s a smaller echo of the artist’s largescale durational performances, such as Echo, Moss and Spill (2022), which comprises a series of dancers moving across large spaces, responding to architecture, and to Pan’s musical scores, for which she is better known.
Numerous elements bombard Bi Rongrong’s massive, collagelike installation, which comprises a constellation of smaller works executed in a range of mediums: from collage, to painting, to embroidery – much of which is sewn into textiles made from silk, cotton and hemp – from Asia, Africa and Europe. Titled To Connect, To Cut, To Draw (2025), it highlights the artist’s interest in circulation and interconnectivity. Held by a metal grid that references the warp and weft in weaving, the work also has small LED lights embedded into the textile, adding an electronic dimension. Plain copper plates are placed next to lace pattern cutouts, reflecting a striking contrast. Patterns of all kinds are found in Bi’s work, primarily from lace that the artist discovered during a residency in Arbon, Switzerland. Other patterns are drawn from Chinese archaeological objects such as oracle bones. Though the sheer multitude and overlapping of so many different elements and materials has the potential to overwhelm visitors, it serves as a visual representation of the hyper-interconnectedness we experience online on a daily basis.
The exhibition ends with Wong Ping’s Debts in the Wind (2025), which comprises a satirical narrative (typical of the artist’s work) defined by intentionally crude video aesthetics and dark humour to address controversial and often taboo topics. Through ten episodes, viewers are privy to the perspective of ten characters, including one ‘I’, who lives inside a hole on a golf course. Others include ‘the businessman’, ‘hairy ball’, ‘intruder 1 and 2’, ‘the young man who knows the law’ and ‘old tree’. The artist uses golf’s associations with the wealthy and elite, and connects them to local/social incidents, including a land dispute related to the building of a new golf course in Hong Kong during the 2010s, to reflect and comment on social inequalities and touchy subjects that range from politics to sex.
The previous Sigg Prize winner, Wang Tuo, known for narrative-driven films that comment on socioeconomic and political issues, was chosen unanimously, according to M+ director Suhanya Raffel, due to his work’s ‘sophisticated imagery and intricate storytelling’ and the way in which ‘many layers of narratives in his epic work help foster cultural dialogue and demonstrate his unique vision of the contemporary world’.
Artists in this year’s selection come with distinct and diverse practices, formally and materially. Applying the same criteria as the previous edition, Wong’s unique low-grade aesthetic and strong satirical narrative could make him a front-runner. Lau’s miniverse is an effective exercise in world building, yields high visual impact and benefits from prominent placement. The experiential nature of Pan’s work elicits visceral reactions but is devoid of an obvious narrative. In stark contrast to both Lau and Pan, Ho and Hsu have a research-driven approach that emphasises academics over aesthetics.
From reflecting on how history is documented, to the resurgence of ancient myths and folktales, to critical reflections on how technological advances are changing society, the one clear takeaway from the exhibition is that it effectively channels discourses occurring in the contemporary art field, not only in China, but all over the world.
Sigg Prize 2025 at M+, Hong Kong, through 4 January 2026
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