Hong Kong-based Sovereign Art Foundation recently announced the winners of the 15th edition of the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, the longest established and one of the most prestigious in the region, awarded to young, mid-career artists. During the Foundation’s Gala Dinner and Auction on 17 May 2019, when artworks submitted for the prize went on sale, Pakistani artist Ahmed Javed was awarded the 2019 Sovereign Asian Art Prize, with a trophy and USD30,000, for his work Imran Qureshi Studio.
Javed was nominated into the Prize by two fellow artists from Pakistan: Adeel Uz Zafar, internationally-acclaimed Karachi born illustrator and painter and fellow alumni of the prestigious National College of Arts, Lahore; and Naiza Khan, Senior Advisor at the Department of Visual Studies, University of Karachi, a member of the Board of Governors, Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, and exhibiting artist in the inaugural Pakistan Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.
Ahmed Javed (b. 1992) received a BFA in Miniature Painting from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2016. His artistic practice questions and at times contests the ‘modernisation’ of miniature painting, by preserving its tradition in the contemporary context. His work focuses especially on the relationship between man and the environment today. Javed is particularly recognised in Pakistan and Australia, and has participated in exhibitions such as “Lahorenama – Behind the Scenes of An Artist Studio” and “A Series of Fortunate Events”, Sanat Gallery, Karachi (2018 and 2017, respectively, both solo shows) and the two-person show “Personal or Social”, Lahore Biennale Festival (2018). He also participated in “Makatab Project” by The Aga Khan Museum for the Lahore Biennale Foundation (2018) and the online auction at Paddle8, and part of A4 Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney (2016). Chair judge David Elliott commented on Javed’s work:
In a field of extremely tight competition, Ahmed Javed’s gouache ‘Imran Qureshi Studio’ has been unanimously proclaimed the winner of The 2019 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Working on a large scale that quotes the neo-miniature style taught at his alma mater, the National College of Arts in Lahore, Javed comments on and transforms this traditional way of working. By concentrating on a moment of creation in Imran Qureshi’s studio where he was an assistant, not only does he stress the importance of his former teacher’s work but also reveals its powerful context. Qureshi is shown making the gestural, blood-red hand paintings that shattered the atmosphere, scale and hierarchical methods of the traditional Mughal miniature to depict horror and terror in the present. In this work, Javed records, frames, amplifies and pays homage to this moment.
The Foundation also awarded minor prizes to three artists. Munawar Ali Syed (b. 1975), also from Pakistan and nominated by fellow miniature artist Waseem Ahmed, won the popular vote and an award of USD1,000 with his artwork My 3rd Story in English. Holding an MA in Art Education from Beaconhouse National University and a BFA in Sculpture from the National College of Art, Lahore, the multidisciplinary artist responds to the proliferation of mass media, propaganda and our self-absorbed attitudes to life. His work also reflects the duality of our advancement and extremism, through notions of identity and individuality, fervour and uncertainty, education and knowledge, and clarity and deception. In his recent work he explores themes of identity, diaspora, pop culture, hierarchy and social stigma.
His awarded work speaks to his individual struggle of living in a third world metropolis and accepting the need to study and understand the English language for success. This struggle is representative of a universal necessity to learn and acquire knowledge in order to advance, and translates into what the artist sees as a quest of knowledge that is now more in the service of acquiring materialistic satisfaction. David Elliott commented about his work:
In this pen-and-ink drawing, one of a series, the artist appropriates a minimal approach, using an agglomeration of straight black lines over a coloured horizontal grid, to express his psychological state. The subject is fear and frustration: the conflict between the desire for knowledge and the imperative to achieve material success. For Syed, this is exacerbated by the, at times brutal, competing chaos of a southern Asian city in which, according to how it is used, the acquisition of English as a foreign language may lead either to enlightenment or to ignorance and despair.
The highest scoring female artist in the competition, China’s Fu Xiaotong was awarded the newly launched Vogue Hong Kong Women’s Art Prize and USD5,000 for her work 163,680 Pinpricks. Nominated by previous prize finalist Dr Lynne Howarth-Gladston, Fu Xiaotong (b. 1976) holds an MFA in Experimental Art from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (2013). Fu’s abstract work explores and transforms traditional culture and materials, focusing on constructing a three-dimensional space on plain rice paper. David Elliott is quoted in the announcement as saying about her work:
Beijing-based artist Fu Xiaotong’s conceptual work ‘163,680 Pinpricks’ was widely acclaimed as the winner of the first Vogue Hong Kong Women’s Art Prize. A graduate in Experimental Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, she works both minimally and conceptually. Here, by applying pressure from behind, she has moulded a form of relief, with different depths, intensities and shapes, that rises out of the surface of a large sheet of hand-made rice paper. Using traditional embroidery tools, she has worked on these forms by multiple penetrations of the paper’s surface to create lines, stippling and shadows as if she were making a drawing. The title of the work refers to the vast number of “pinpricks,” that governed this process. The surface created by this “aesthetic acupuncture” suggests a multitude of forms. Teetering on an edge between material and void, the artist has created a territory that is indefinable other than by suggestions of gender. Whether landscape or map, it is characterised by a fecund balance of mountains, breasts, snake eggs and dreams.
The winners were selected from a shortlist of 30 finalist artists, all nominated amongst a total of 400 mid-career artists from 28 countries in the Asia-Pacific region by 70 independent art professionals. A total of 19 countries were represented amongst the 30 finalists, making it the most geographically diverse shortlist in the history of the Prize. The entries were shortlisted by an international panel of world-class art specialists, including writer, curator and museum director David Elliott; Jan Dalley, Arts Editor of the Financial Times; Mami Kataoka, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Hong Kong architect, artist and educator William Lim; and internationally renowned artist Zhang Huan.
All finalists’ artworks, with the exception of the Grand Prize winner, were sold at exhibition or auctioned at The Sovereign Art Foundation’s “Make It Better” Gala on 17 May 2019 at Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong. Auction proceeds were split evenly between the artists and SAF’s charitable projects.