Rising Chinese Artist Wang Tuo Wins M+ Museum’s $64,000 Prize

Wang Tuo, a young Chinese artist whose videos and paintings have gained him acclaim in his home country, has won the Sigg Prize, a $64,000 art award for Chinese artists that is facilitated by Hong Kong’s M+ museum.

Artists Jes Fan, Miao Ying, Xie Nanxing, Trevor Yeung, and Yu Ji had also been shortlisted for the prize. Each will take home around $12,800.

Wang’s work has previously taken up topics such as censorship in China and the recent history of art-making in the country, where some artists have bristled with authorities because of their experimental practices. The artist himself has said he would have faced difficulty if he tried to show some of his works in mainland China.

He won the award for The Northeast Tetralogy (2018–21), a multichannel installation composed of four videos that each traverse different swaths of Chinese history, exploring how events such as the May Fourth Movement of 1919 have been translated across time. In a statement, the prize’s jury praised how the work’s “interweaving of multi-dimensional narratives creates an elegant and resonating cinematic experience that fuses historical events and speculative narratives, offering deep contemplation on the relationship between archive and fiction.”

Wang has not yet turned 40, but he has already found a following in the Greater China region, appearing in the 2021 Shanghai Biennale, among other showcases. When Wang had a show at Hong Kong’s Blindspot Gallery in 2023, Andrew Russeth wrote in an ARTnews profile that the exhibition “seems likely to cement his status as one of China’s most important emerging artists.”