Grand winners of Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech 2023 presented by Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing

Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech, launched in 2017, is an annual award program developed by Hyundai Motor to recognize and foster a new generation of Chinese creative curators through a variety of professional support activities, including the opportunity for grand winners to showcase their curatorial works at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing. Every year, a new theme is presented with the goal of inspiring rising Chinese curators to reflect creatively and critically on the most serious issues of our day and engaging the public in a broader debate based on the winning exhibitions.

Participants were asked to imagine how to recreate our decentralized life from the perspectives of art, technology, and the humanities, with a focus on the theme “Decentralized Reworlding” for the year 2023. Jurors, media professionals, and the public chose Jianghong Chen and Zheng Li’s The Animal Farm Simulator and Xiao Zong’s Metamorphic Ecosphere from among the five groups shortlisted in August 2022.

Jianghong Chen is a design researcher and creative planner. Zheng Li is a curator, social innovation project researcher for children, and fashion designer. Their installation The Animal Farm Simulator is a daring and philosophical contemplation on how to create a new environment through co-creation, collaboration, and the sharing of their forward-thinking curatorial technique. Everything in nature is believed to have a soul in an imaginative animism era, and when non-anthropocentrism becomes the norm, farms become the most important unit of production on a global scale. The curators’ chosen pieces construct a “farm simulator,” a futuristic experimental setting where people and animals coexist, depicting the entire farm biosphere as a network system made up of brain neurons linked by mutual synergy and mutation.

Xiao Zong, a curator based in Shanghai, is fascinated by the impact of technology on socioeconomic and ecological processes. Xiao Zong examines, imagines, and analyzes on alternative social, economic, and environmental structures from a non-human perspective in her exhibition Metamorphic Ecosphere in order to accept the “invasion” of other species and embrace a symbiotic or coexisting system between humans and non-humans. The exhibition urges us to use “Metamorphosis” to transform ourselves and reflect on our interactions with other animals. We have transformation, transposition, dissemination, and interdependence in addition to opposition and rivalry. Metamorphosis promotes interspecies communication, laying the framework for true 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 prize winners, Jianghong Chen, Zheng Li, and Xiao Zong have been invited to organize shows at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing in 2023, with each exhibition receiving a grant of 600,000 yuan. Their displays will take place after the exhibitions of the two grand prize winners of the Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech 2022. They will also receive additional assistance with exhibition promotion and expanded public programs.

Since its inception, the Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech has remained loyal to its initial goal of creating a forum to assist curators with inventive and critical minds while encouraging a worldwide conversation about our shared future. The prize program has evolved over time into an essential incubator for a wide range of cutting-edge issues, particularly the interplay of art and technology.