Parul Gupta Wins Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2023

Parul Gupta Follow +

Gupta’s prize-winning work attempts to trap movement in a static surface.

The Sovereign Art Foundation today announced Parul Gupta the Grand Prize Winner of the 2023 Sovereign Asian Art Prize.

Finalists from 16 countries and territories in the Asia Pacific region were shortlisted for the U.S. $30,000 prize.

Gupta won for her ink on paper work Notes on Movement- Layer #115 (2022), in which she layers copies of the same intricate drawing to give the suggestion of movement. She likens the work to a video still.

‘I do not come from an art background, and I started practising art much later in life,’ Gupta said in her acceptance speech at the Sovereign Asian Art Prize Gala Dinner and Charity Auction on Friday 19 May.

‘I took many detours before I realised that it’s only through art that I can live a life I desire for myself—a life that is truly independent. This word “independent”, encompasses everything which defies the structural norms of society, and rightly so,’ she said.

The same evening, Thai artist Alisa Chunchue was awarded the U.S. $5,000 Vogue Hong Kong Women’s Art Prize for her work Wound (2022), a drawing that references surgical stitches.

Indian artist Cop Shiva won the U.S. $1,000 Public Vote Prize for his work No Longer a Memory (2022), a portrait of him and his mother, both wearing sunglasses and colourful suits, posing with goats in front of a floral print backdrop. The work honours the artist’s childhood, when he and his mother played by candlelight in their village hut.

The finalists for the prize were shortlisted by a judging panel including curators David Elliott, Siuli Tan, and Yuko Hasegawa, Asia Art Archive‘s Christopher K Ho, and the winner of the 2022 Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Azin Zolfaghari. —[O]

Main image: Artists Cop Shiva, Parul Gupta, and Alisa Chunchue at The Sovereign Asian Art Prize Gala Dinner and Charity Auction, 19 May 2023. Courtesy The Sovereign Art Foundation.