Ceramist Jongjin Park Awarded Loewe Foundation Craft Prize 2026

The awards ceremony for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize is never boring. Outside the National Gallery of Singapore on a warm, humid Tuesday evening, hundreds of fans clamored for a glimpse of the K-pop idol and Loewe ambassador Giselle. Inside, the panel of 15 international judges (including designer Patricia Urquiola and Loewe’s creative directors Jack McCollough and Lázaro Hernández), the 30 finalists, international press, and Singapore’s beau monde (including Malaysian princesses and socialites) mingled in anticipation of the announcement of this year’s winner.  

Korean ceramist Jongjin Park’s extraordinary Strata of Illusion, 2025, was unanimously chosen by the jury to be awarded the prestigious €50,000 prize (approximately $58,100) for “confounding the expectations of what ceramics can be,” explained Sheila Loewe, President of the Loewe Foundation. Park’s embrace of the tense unpredictability between control and collapse—where he densely layers thousands of sheets of paper coated in colored porcelain slip before leaving it to the heat and gravity in the kiln to slump and distort at will—ticked all the jury’s boxes for “technical accomplishment, skill, innovation and artistic vision.”

The ceramist and Seoul Women’s University professor said after the ceremony, “while my identity stays with the traditional way of making the ceramics, I also think a lot about its limits. Why can’t it be transformed after firing in the kiln? And why is a broken, imperfect thing considered bad? I’ve been thinking about these things for a long time,” he explained after the awards ceremony. For his winning work, “from a material point of view, and from a technical point of view, I think there is meaning in abutting the existing ceramic processes and suggesting a new method.”

Among the 30 works celebrating the full spectrum of craft, from glassblowing and bookbinding to lacquering and woodworking, two further pieces were awarded special mentions (receiving a $5,800 each). Respected Italian jeweler Graziano Visintin was recognized for his contemporary application of a 12th-century recipe for niello (an alloy of silver, copper, and lead), using it to decorate two strings of delicately folded tiny gold cubes in a way that intimated the effect of endless miniature paintings.

The other combined ancestral Ghanaian weaving with cutting-edge technology. Represented by master weaver Mary Anaba and Spanish designer Álvaro Catalán de Ocón, their collaborative Frafra Tapestry (2024) was drawn from a mapped-out satellite view of a traditional Gurunsi region village, then transformed into a graphic, dynamic monochromatic wall hanging by a collective of eight Baba Tree master weavers using traditional basketry techniques with natural and dyed elephant-grass.

The exhibition of shortlisted works—selected from over 5,100 submissions by artists representing 133 countries—incited interesting new conversations about “what is craft?” Each one was unmistakably bold and daring, their inherent making processes painstaking and passionate, and for some makers, the works were imbued with decades and decades of experience (like the Taiwanese bamboo weaver Chia-Chen Hsieh, Norwegian textile artist Gjertrude Hals, and Australian glass maker Kirstie Rea).

Yet was it OK that a product designer like Catalán de Ocón (perhaps best known for his innovative PET lamp woven from colourful threads made from repurposed plastic water bottles) was in the mix? Is craft allowed to be so commercial? His response: “design and craft came together to create these magical pieces, which I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to do myself, and maybe Mary (Anaba, master weaver) and the eight weavers we’ve worked with couldn’t have done it either. It’s a work of pure collaboration between craft and ways of thinking around design.”

Equally, did a beautiful, sleekly silhouetted bench by Koren furniture maker Jong In Lee bear enough meaning if the walnut he used was imported from America and not indigenous of his country? Or that British artist and designer Jobe Burns’ lacquered and painted steel vessel was made in a factory. Sheila Loewe embraces it all. “I would say that one of my most interesting surprises this year has been Jobe talking about the importance of recognizing industrial craft has as much value as something made by hand for the very first time,” she says.

For something to qualify as craft—rather than art or design—does it need to be as much about the maker’s skill as it needs to be imbued with the deeper resonance of their cultural heritage, the landscape that surrounds where they live and work, and the traditions of their forebears? “Perhaps I am more romantic, but for me, the craft world has a special meaning and feeling because of the stories of how the craft artists fell in love with the material they work with and the place where they work. For me, it is so valuable.”

Loewe also loved that many of the works on show had also been created with the maker’s own materials, “like the Brazilian self-taught visual artist Vivi Rosa, who handcrafts compositions made from a mix of cement, crushed glass, shredded cotton and pigments,” Loewe cites. Lagos-London-based multidisciplinary artist Fadekemi Ogunsanya moved specifically to Nigeria to resurrect the lost visual symbolism of her Yoruba tribe through the techniques of Adire resist-dyeing, where symbols are first hand-drawn with a feature quill onto cotton using a traditional canvas starch before being hand-dyed in natural indigo and then embroidered.

As first-time members of the jury, having replaced British designer Jonathan Anderson at Loewe last May, McCollough and Hernández were impressed by “the diversity of the work, through so many different mediums, opinions and voices,” said McCollough. “What’s beautiful about the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize is that it’s about craft making at the highest level, which for us is super exciting,” says Hernández. “To see people give their work a lot of detail, care, attention, and time, even to the smallest things, is really inspiring to us.”

The designers also relished seeing the works in the flesh. “I like to like experience work physically and viscerally through my senses before diving into the back story,” says Hernández. “When we walked into the exhibit, we were just very surprised by the scale and proportions of the work and discovered new things that we hadn’t seen just looking at the images,” adds McCollough. “Like the little circular piece done by Singaporean artist Adelene Koh—for some reason in my head I thought it was a huge circle, and then when we saw it in person, it was tiny. Or the carved, charred, sanded, and oiled wooden work by Haitian multi-disciplinarian Hervé Sabin that I first thought was a bench but turned out to be a small vessel.”

It is no mean feat to have elevated the recognition of craft to such an influential international standing, especially when setting the exhibition of shortlisted works in such a magnificent setting as the National Gallery Singapore (a vast, elegant space formed in the mid-2000s by combining the former early 20th century Supreme Court and City Hall buildings in the heart of the city). It is not only keeping very good company alongside the world’s largest public collection of Southeast Asian modern art, but it also brings the Loewe Foundation’s ambitions for craft to an entirely new audience in Southeast Asia for the first time.

“Supporting craft globally is very, very important,” says Loewe, who has headed the Foundation since 2013. “Craft is about our cultural heritage, and the craft prize is helping to save skills that otherwise will be lost,” she says. It is a passion long held at the heart of the Spanish fashion house since her great-great-grandfather unified a collective of expert leather makers under the one brand. “We realize that for many people, craft is a discovery, and not everyone is at first in love with this world. But we have the feeling that once they know it, they want to stay close to it. Here, we are all in love with craft, and we want to make it contagious,” she beams.

Artwork by the finalists will be on display at the National Gallery Singapore from
May 13 to June 14.