News
Chinese artist Zhou Tao, winner of the Han Nefkens Foundation – BACC Award
Chinese artist Zhou Tao (Changsha, 1976) has been named winner of the first Han Nefkens Foundation BACC Award for Contemporary Art. This newly created award aims to promote young artists who live and work in the Asia region. The inaugural winner is Zhou Tao, who lives in Guangzhou, a commercial city in southern China. The biennial award is an initiative of Dutch collector and writer Han Nefkens and of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC).
The award targets artists under 40 who have built up a solid body of work but have not yet managed to consolidate an international career.
This was the case with Zhou Tao, who was unanimously chosen for his profound commitment to his environment, with the jury valuing Zhou Tao´s “intelligent use of the most appropriate medium in each case to analyse and compare different spheres such as public/private or rural/urban and even art history in general”.
The award is worth 15,000 USD: 3,000 in artist´s fees and 12,000 towards creating a new project at the BACC or for the Bangkok metropolitan area. The jury believes that Zhou Tao´s residency in Bangkok will benefit both the city and the artist, particularly given his great curiosity for his immediate surroundings. It will also allow him to further develop his works, because, in the jury´s opinion, “his works show great maturity but he is in the process of searching for his own original voice.”
The choice was unanimous. The jury of the first Han Nefkens Foundation BACC Award was chaired by art collector Han Nefkens and its members were Hilde Teerlinck, Director of the Han Nefkens Foundation and FRAC Nord-Pas-de-Calais; Luckana Kunavichayanont, Director of the BACC; Yuko Hasegawa, Head Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Tokyo and Feng Boyi, a Chinese freelance curator and art critic.
Picture, from left to right: Luckana Kunavichayanont, Han Nefkens and Hilde Teerlinck.
The award targets artists under 40 who have built up a solid body of work but have not yet managed to consolidate an international career.
This was the case with Zhou Tao, who was unanimously chosen for his profound commitment to his environment, with the jury valuing Zhou Tao´s “intelligent use of the most appropriate medium in each case to analyse and compare different spheres such as public/private or rural/urban and even art history in general”.
The award is worth 15,000 USD: 3,000 in artist´s fees and 12,000 towards creating a new project at the BACC or for the Bangkok metropolitan area. The jury believes that Zhou Tao´s residency in Bangkok will benefit both the city and the artist, particularly given his great curiosity for his immediate surroundings. It will also allow him to further develop his works, because, in the jury´s opinion, “his works show great maturity but he is in the process of searching for his own original voice.”
The choice was unanimous. The jury of the first Han Nefkens Foundation BACC Award was chaired by art collector Han Nefkens and its members were Hilde Teerlinck, Director of the Han Nefkens Foundation and FRAC Nord-Pas-de-Calais; Luckana Kunavichayanont, Director of the BACC; Yuko Hasegawa, Head Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Tokyo and Feng Boyi, a Chinese freelance curator and art critic.
Picture, from left to right: Luckana Kunavichayanont, Han Nefkens and Hilde Teerlinck.
ArtAids
The ArtAids foundation was set up in 2006 at Han Nefkens’ initiative. ArtAids fights AIDS with the power of art as its most important weapon. ArtAids invites leading artists to produce work that is inspired by AIDS and related problems. These works of art are used to raise the public’s consciousness and to encourage their involvement.
Fundació Han Nefkens
The Han Nefkens Foundation is a private non-profit organisation that was set up in Barcelona in 2009 with the aim of promoting the production of contemporary artworks. The mission is to stimulate artistic creation in Barcelona by offering international artists an opportunity to create artworks and interventions in the city, and to promote other fields of contemporary creation.
H+F
Han Nefkens started to collect art in 2000. The H+F Collection, named after himself and his partner Felipe, is in long-term loan to various museums in The Netherlands and abroad. Nowadays Han Nefkens is not only active as a collector but also as an initiator of international art projects, often in collaboration with museums and other art institutions.
