Cheng Ran And Cameron Rowland Win Inaugural Nomura Emerging Artist Award

On May 21, at a ceremony in Kyoto, the Japan-based financial services company Nomura Holdings announced Cheng Ran and Cameron Rowland as the inaugural winners of the Nomura Emerging Artist Award. They each received USD 100,000.

Cheng Ran, who lives and works in Hangzhou, is known for his poetic film and video works exploring spirituality and alienation within contemporary society. He received international recognition for his film project Diary of a Madman (2016), a set of 15 vignettes centered on myth, history, and otherness.

New York-based conceptual artist Cameron Rowland engages in cultural and social critique primarily through readymade sculptural objects. Among his highly acclaimed solo exhibitions are “91020000” at Artists Space, New York (2016) and “D37” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018–19), both of which tackle the continuities between America’s history of slavery and contemporary racial oppression.

Cheng and Rowland were selected by a jury comprising Doryun Chong, deputy director and chief curator of Hong Kong’s M+; Kathy Halbreich, executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York; Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo; Max Hollein, director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; Nicholas Serota, chair of Arts Council England; Allan Schwartzman, founder and principal of Art Agency, Partners, and chairman of the Global Fine Arts division at Sotheby’s; and the late curator and critic Okwui Enwezor. 

Speaking on behalf of the jury, Halbreich praised the winners for their “high purpose, exceptional intellectual ambition, and profound sensitivity to the fast-moving currents of today’s world.”

This October, Nomura Holdings will announce the inuaugural recipient of the USD 1 million Nomura Art Award.

Ophelia Lai is ArtAsiaPacific’s reviews editor.

To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.