In a year that underscored the diversity and dynamism of contemporary art from Greater China, artists Wong Ping and Heidi Lau have been announced as joint winners of the 2025 Sigg Prize, Hong Kong’s most prestigious award for contemporary art. Presented by M+, the museum of visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District, the biennial prize recognizes outstanding artists born or working in the region whose practices reflect the pulse of their times.
Chosen from six shortlisted finalists, Wong and Lau were commended by the international jury for their distinct yet complementary approaches to memory, identity, and the surreal. Their works, while strikingly different in medium and tone, both navigate personal and collective experience with a deeply human sensibility that transcends geography.
Wong Ping: Digital Satire and Urban Psyche
Known for his vividly animated films that merge biting humour with unsettling psychological depth, Wong Ping continues to define the frontiers of digital storytelling in Asia. His lurid, candy-coloured worlds explore themes of repression, absurdity, and moral dissonance in modern society.
At M+, Wong presented his latest installation Still Not Happy, which evolves his trademark 2D aesthetic into a room-sized projection environment combining animation, sculptural inflatables, and synthetic soundscapes. The work unravels a fragmented urban narrative—funny and grotesque in equal measure—echoing the alienation of life lived through screens. The jury praised Wong’s “boldly irreverent imagination and precise visual language that turns pop absurdity into moral critique.”
Heidi Lau: Memory, Myth, and Clay
In contrast, Heidi Lau, born in Macau and now based in New York, works with clay and ceramic processes to sculpt poetic portals into the unseen world. Drawing on Taoist cosmology, folklore, and funerary architecture, her practice transforms the materiality of earth into meditations on ancestry, loss, and regeneration.
Her Sigg Prize presentation, Study for the Afterlife Pavilion, comprised intricate ceramic relics and totemic forms suspended within a dimly lit installation. Each vessel, cracked and glazed with luminous texture, feels excavated from an alternative archaeology. The jury cited Lau’s “tactile intelligence and spiritual resonance,” noting how her work “bridges traditional craft and metaphysical inquiry.”
A Shared Vision of the Intimate and the Imagined
The decision to jointly award the prize reflects a curatorial sensitivity to the multiplicity of voices shaping contemporary Chinese art today. While Wong probes the dissonant present through digital parable, Lau delves into the spectral past through clay and ritual. Together, they sketch a narrative of continuity—between satire and spirituality, between the body and technology, between remembering and remaking.
Their recognition underlines the Sigg Prize’s evolving mission: to celebrate artists who expand the language of contemporary life while remaining rooted in the cultural complexities of the region.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
