The Loewe Craft Prize Lands in Singapore

Reported by Vogue.

The handmade is having a moment — and the Loewe Foundation is making sure the world pays attention. The annual Craft Prize exhibition has landed at Singapore's National Gallery for the first time in Southeast Asia, bringing together 30 finalists from 19 countries, selected from more than 5,100 submissions across 133 nations, according to Vogue. Nine years in, the prize has quietly become one of the most important platforms for craft on the planet.

This year carried an added charge: Proenza Schouler designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez joined the jury for the first time following Jonathan Anderson's exit from Loewe. Their influence registered immediately. "The beauty and the love of making things to the highest degree is so exciting and so rare these days," said Hernandez. Foundation president Sheila Loewe noted the shift in energy — more color, more vibrancy — and made no secret of her delight at having them on board.

The Winner, and Why It Matters

The €50,000 prize went to Korean ceramic artist Jongjin Park for Strata of Illusion, a chair-like form built from sheets of paper coated in porcelain and stacked into a pastel millefeuille — which then partially collapsed in the kiln, accidentally. That tension between fragility and structure, between intent and accident, captivated the jury. "It belied the true nature of its materiality," said Abraham Thomas, curator of modern architecture, design, and decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, calling it proof of how expansive ceramics can be. South Korea claimed six of the 30 finalist spots overall — a dominance Sheila Loewe attributed to the country's deep, unforced fluency in contemporary craft.

Special mentions went to Italian jeweler Graziano Visintin for necklaces of paper-thin gold cubes, and to Ghana-based Baba Tree Master Weavers, whose three-meter wall tapestry — woven from elephant grass using drone photography as its map — functioned as what the artists called a living anthropological document of Ghana's Frafra communities. Across the shortlist, recurring themes emerged: cultural memory, material subversion, and the collision of ancient technique with experimental form. A 1,300-year-old Japanese dry lacquer method. Anamorphic black glass twisted in a kiln. Vintage glass stretched into what one artist described as an embodiment of powerlessness — visceral enough to recall Francis Bacon. The range was staggering.

What runs beneath all of it is something more urgent than aesthetics. "In this screen-based world of intangible pixels dominating our lives, these are all people interested in a physical relationship with the world," said Deyan Sudjic, director emeritus of the Design Museum in London — and this year saw more submissions than ever before. As AI accelerates and the digital swallows more of daily life, the radical act of spending a year making a single object by hand is starting to feel less niche and more necessary.

The Loewe Foundation Craft Prize exhibition runs at the National Gallery Singapore until June 14, 2026 — go if you can, because craft this alive deserves to be seen in person.

Read the original at Vogue.