On 9 December 2024, the Winners of the Tenth International Awards for Art Criticism (IAAC 10) were announced at a ceremony held at the Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum. The First Prize went to XI Yuan from Virginia, who won a cash award of 10,000 Euros and a short residency in London and Edinburgh. The Joint Second Award winners, Dylan Huw from Wales, WANG Ruxuan from Taiwan, and Louis Shankar from London, each received a cash rpize of 3,500 euros.

Over the past ten years, the International Awards for Art Criticism have received a total of 2,618 submissions. For the 10th edition of the Awards there was a total of 344 submissions in Chinese and English. The submissions came from 41 countries and regions worldwide.

Over 45% of the Chinese-language submissions came from Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong. Among the Chinese competitors, students constituted the most prominent group, followed by curators and freelance writers. 30% of the English-language submissions came  from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany, followed closely by Australia, Greece, and Denmark. Among the English submissions, freelance writers accounted for 22.22%, followed by curators, artists, and students.

The International Awards have had a remarkable decade in China, during which the Organizing Committee and successive panels of five different international jurors each year, have continued to address issues such as the reviewers’ sense of engagement, the quality of their writing, their clarity of expression, their capacity for critical analysis and their ability to supply their readers with adequate background information. In addition, the reviewers’ choice of exhibitions and the impact of this choice on their writing came into question, although there was general agreement, in the end that what really mattered was the writing itself, not the object of its review.

This year’s jury was composed of the following five judges: Cristiana Collu, Italian museum director, independent curator, art historian and lecturer; DU Keke, Editor of Artforum China, writer and translator; Gerardo Mosquera, Independent curator, critic and writer based in Havana and Madrid; Małgorzata Kaźmierczak, International President of AICA, Ph.D. in History, art critic, independent curator and academic based in Kraków, Poland; YOU Mi, Professor of Art and Economies at the University of Kassel / documenta Institut.

After two days’ critical scrutiny of forty shortlisted submissions at the School of Philosophy, Fudan University – all of them, anonymised - the jury decided on four winners:

First Prize Winner (Chinese submission): XI Yuan

Second Prize Winner (English submission): Dylan Huw

Second Prize Winner (Chinese contribution): WANG Ruxuan

Second Prize Winner (English contribution): Louis Shankar

Professor Sun Xiangchen, from the School of Philosophy at Fudan University and co-chair of the IAAC’s Organising Committee said: ‘IAAC's uniqueness lies in its bilingual submission format, allowing more non-English thoughts to enter the English-speaking world. This is a creative effort to connect different parts of the world. Humanity needs to transcend race, nation, and civilization, building friendships among people. In this small global village, mutual visits should be commonplace, and we should create more channels. Not only does China need to integrate more into the world, but the world also needs to listen more to voices different from the English-speaking world. ’

Henry Meyric Hughes, co-chair of the Awards’ Organising Committee, said: ‘Art criticism is about art and life. It does not treat art in isolation or monetary values. It’s based on looking and reflecting on what we see in a wider social and cultural context. This has become more difficult in the age of soundbites and social media, but all the more important for that! Above all, it has to draw on its historical, physical, social and cultural contexts. That also serves to explain the IAAC’s increasing focus on local and regional diversity over the years. The forthcoming publication to celebrate the 10^th Anniversary of the IAAC will help to demonstrate this and serve as a possible pointer to the future.’

One of the organizers of this year's International Awards for Art Criticism, Director of Shanghai Jiu Shi Art Museum, Gu Jiqing, said: ‘The conclusion of today's award ceremony marks the beginning of the next decade of the International Awards for Art Criticism Awards. In the coming days, the Jiushi Art Museum will build a more open and inclusive platform to promote mutual learning and appreciation of global art criticism through a variety of collaborative projects and exchange activities. We will also continue to support academic research in the field of art criticism and encourage more scholars and critics to devote themselves to the theory and practice of art criticism. Art criticism should not be limited to academia, but should also go public. We believe that the diversity and openness of art criticism will inspire more people to be creative and reflective, and bring richer cultural experiences to society.’

22 reviews from the final selection, including the four Award-Winning ones, will be published in Chinese and English in IAAC Exhibition Review Annual 10 in summer, 2025.

The Tenth International Awards for Art Criticism are organised by The International Awards for Art Criticism (IAAC), sponsored by the Philosophy School at Fudan University and Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum, and co-organized by the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London and Edinburgh University College of Art (ECA), with support from International Association of Art Critics (AICA), in Paris.

Introduction of IAAC 10 Prize Winners

First Prize

XI Yuan

Title：History After the End: on Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s

Exhibition：Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s (Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona)

Xi Yuan is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia. His primary research areas include cultural sociology, historical sociology, and political sociology, with a core theoretical focus on explaining ‘why people are willing to believe’. His early research was in the field of sociology of education, focusing on issues such as teacher-student relationships and school policies, with related articles published in Higher Education Review, Journal of Education, and Asia Pacific Education Review.

His recent main research addresses the political system and the changes in political culture in China, in the course of which he has analysed state-building and the construction of legitimacy at different historical stages. His secondary research focuses on popular culture, exploring the impact of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, on fields such as art and divination.

Xi has presented his work at multiple academic conferences and has received funding support from various institutions at the University of Virginia. Additionally, he has independently or collaboratively translated works such as The State as a Conceptual Variable, Comparing Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, and Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, with related translations in preparation and review.

Joint Second Prize

Dylan Huw

Title：Seeing unclearly: on Nebula

Exhibition：Nebula (Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice)

Dylan Huw (b.1996, Aberystwyth) is a writer and collaborative practitioner living in Caernarfon, north-west Cymru/Wales. He was the journal editor for Artes Mundi 10, and writes widely about contemporary art and cinema, with a particular focus on artists' film and video in circulation, for Artforum, Frieze, e-flux Criticism, Art Monthly and others. A former Visual AIDS Research Fellow (2023), Flaherty Curatorial Fellow (2023), Future Wales Fellow (2022-3) and Jerwood Writer in Residence (2022), his work is invested in rehearsing a poetics and praxis of provisionality, translating across languages, disciplines and modes of reception. He has a BA in Liberal Arts from King's College London and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Joint Second Prize

WANG Ru Xuan

Title：A Hybrid Narrative of Surface-Interior Twins: On Three Episodes of Mourning Exercises

Exhibition：Three Episodes of Mourning Exercises（Argos Centre for Audiovisual Arts, Brussels）

Wang Ruxuan, born in 1994, graduated with a master’s degree from the Department of Fine Arts at Taiwan University of Arts. He is currently an artist and an editor at Art Temper. Wang is based in Taipei, where he both creates and resides. His exhibition history includes a little fable (2022, Zone Art, Taoyuan), 5F, No. 18 (2023, 80 A Gallery, Taipei), Next Door: A Group Exhibition by Lin Junda, Wang Ruxuan, and Chen Yanchi (2023, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu), and Story Teller (2024, WMM Untitled, Taipei).

Joint Second Prize

Louis Shankar

Title:‘oh inch of nature!’

Exhibition：When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture（Hayward Gallery, London）

Louis Shankar is a writer, researcher, editor, and teacher based in East London. They recently completed a PhD on the late art of David Wojnarowicz at UCL. They are an editor at The BitterSweet Review, a magazine of new queer writing. They are working on their first book.

Chinese Language Shortlisted IAAC 10

CENG Yuting

Title: Random Thoughts: Impossible to Cut Off, Impossible to Put in Order

Exhibition：Annette Messager: Desire Disorder（Power Station of Art, Shanghai）

CHEN Shuyu

Title: Masks, the Mind’s Eye, and Mirror Games

Exhibition：Liminal（Pinault Collection, Punta della Dogana, Venice）

KONG Peng

Title: Cao Yu’s Theatre of the Body

Exhibition：Cao Yu: Septic Tank（Galerie Urs Meile Beijing）

LIAO Shuting

Title: Endless Judgment: Coming and Going in a Gravitational Arena

Exhibition:Gravitational Arena（Shanghai Pudong Art Museum）

LIU Yuhan

Title: The Witch’s Network of Desire — Annette Messager

Exhibition: Annette Messager: Desire Disorder（Shanghai Power Station of Art）

LUO Yifei

Exhibition: Li Lang: ‘The Third Temporality’

Title: Li Lang: ‘The Third Temporality’ Xie Zilong Photography Museum, Hunan）

QIU Yun

Title: If We are Close Enough, You Will Finally Hear Me

Exhibition：Soft Target（Künstlerhaus Dortmund）

WANG Youyou

Title: Leaky Variations

Exhibition：Yuko Mohri: Moré and Moré（Aranya Art Center）

XU Chujun

Title: Images That Are (Not) There: Là at S.M.A.K.

Exhibition：There (S.M.A.K)