Ryoji Ikeda Wins Nam June Paik Prize

Ryoji Ikeda, the Japanese visual artist and composer known for his explorations of sound, has been named the winner of the ninth Nam June Paik Prize, the biannual award given by the Nam June Paik Art Centre in Yongin, South Korea.

The prize is worth KRW 50 million (approximately £27,000) and also includes a solo exhibition at the centre for the winner, due to open in 2027. Ikeda will collect the prize at a ceremony on 8 September, followed by a conversation with the curator Sam Ozer.

“I am deeply honoured to receive the Nam June Paik Prize,” Ikeda said in a statement, adding that he had met Paik in the artist’s later years and that Paik’s work still speaks to the questions behind his own.

Born in Gifu in 1966 and now dividing his time between Paris and Kyoto, Ikeda first found an audience in the 1990s making music from the pops, clicks and glitches of digital audio—the errors most producers spend their careers trying to eliminate. 

His installations have filled the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Park Avenue Armory, the Pompidou Centre, Taipei Fine Arts Museum and 180 Studios in London, with shows last year at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the National Asian Culture Centre in Gwangju.

data-verse 1, commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary, premiered at the 2019 Venice Biennale; the audiovisual performance superposition (2012) has toured venues including the Barbican Centre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The prize’s jury was chaired by the art historian John G Hanhardt, a longtime interlocutor of Paik’s and former senior curator at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Hanhardt called Ikeda a “visionary” in Paik’s mould, whose hybrid works offer viewers a contemplative space and an adventure in equal measure.

Ellen Pau, co-founder of Videotage—the Hong Kong non-profit that supports emerging new media artists—who nominated the artist, credited him with making opaque technical infrastructures “sensorially legible” and opening up public debate around information, surveillance and scale. Jury member Sabine Himmelsbach, director of the House of Electronic Arts in Basel, said Ikeda had extended Paik’s experimental legacy into the era of algorithmic culture.

Established in 2009 and funded by the Gyeonggi Provincial Government, the Nam June Paik Prize goes to an artist whose experimentation and innovation have contributed to contemporary art and, in the terms of the award, to world peace. Previous winners include Ceal Floyer, Bruno Latour, Doug Aitken, Haroon Mirza, Blast Theory, Trevor Paglen, CAMP and Joan Jonas.