Loewe Foundation Craft Prize Turns Ten in Singapore

May 13. The Loewe Foundation Craft Prize opened its tenth edition in Singapore yesterday, the first time the show has returned to Asia since the 2019 Bangkok round. Thirty finalists are on view at the ArtScience Museum through June 8.

The brief is wide: any object, any material, any technique that the maker calls craft. No medium restrictions. No minimum or maximum scale. This year's shortlist runs from a hand-blown glass vessel the size of a fist (Rui Sasaki, Japan) to a ten-foot woven bamboo installation that blocks half the gallery floor (Tanabe Chikuunsai IV, also Japan). The prize is €50,000 and a commission. The winner gets announced on the final day.

Lazaro Hernandez, one half of Loewe's new creative director duo with Jack McCollough, told AnOther: "For us, the idea of craft doesn't necessarily have to be crafty." The line holds. This year's finalists skew conceptual. A set of hand-carved wooden mirrors by British maker Gareth Neal look like furniture until you notice the grain has been scorched into a gradient. A series of ceramic vessels by South Korean artist Choi In-gyu are glazed in a single color but fired at temperatures high enough to crack the surface into a topographic map. The object is the process, frozen.

The Singapore venue matters. The ArtScience Museum is Marina Bay Sands, the lotus-shaped building that shows up in every skyline photo. The prize has rotated cities since 2017: Paris, Tokyo, New York, Seoul, Barcelona. Returning to Asia after a seven-year gap suggests the foundation sees the region as more than a tour stop. Two of the five highlighted works in the press release are by Japanese makers. The bamboo installation and the glass vessel both come from practices with multi-generational lineages. That's not accident.

The show closes June 8. The winner announcement is the same day, 6 PM Singapore time. No livestream announced yet.