The Collector | Does the M+ Sigg Prize, which went to a video artist, accurately showcase contemporary Chinese art or is it out of step?
- The international jury selected four video works and not a single painting among its six finalists
- Swiss collector Uli Sigg believes that the dominance of video art is a global trend
I recently went to the reopened M+ Pavilion, in West Kowloon Cultural District, to revisit all the works shortlisted for the M+ Sigg Prize. I’d been to the Sigg Prize exhibition in December but it takes more than one visit to digest the nearly four hours of videos in the show, and the exhibition was out of bounds for a long time because of the pandemic.
The dominance of videos is a defining feature of the selection made by a jury of six. Four of the six finalists were picked for moving images, including Samson Young Kar-fai, who took the top gong and a cheque for HK$500,000 for Muted Situations #22: Muted Tchaikovsky’s 5th (2018).
It says a lot about what the international jury considers the most interesting work by contemporary artists from Greater China.
Video is a great medium for describing today’s world, of course. Apart from its mobility, it fulfils what a lot of us want amid the current crises: an alternative to vile reality but not so abstract as to lose all immediacy and relevance.
There is an end-of-the-world nostalgia in Tao Hui’s Hello, Finale! (2017), a series of nine films shot in Kyoto. Watching them and Shen Xin’s four-channel Provocation of the Nightingale (2017), I was reminded of the words of one of the great minds of contemporary art, Mieke Bal: art that takes time to view is “a plea for a slow-down of our current culture of haste”.