The winner of the fifth version of the annual Loewe Basis Craft Prize was introduced yesterday night in Seoul, with the award going to the Korean weaver Dahye Jeong. She gained the €50,000 prize—probably the most profitable for craft on the earth—for her piece A Time of Sincerity (2021), a 30cm-high basket woven completely from horsehair.
In accordance with Jeong, using horsehair is no less than 500 years outdated. Throughout Korea’s Joseon Dynasty (14th to the early twentieth century) the fabric was used for making males’s headwear. “Though this work was achieved on my own alone, it isn’t solely my very own. I’ve a 500 yr outdated historical past behind me. This work is concerning the time that has gathered, and due to this reference I’m able to create this piece,” Jeong says.
Her work was chosen by a jury that features the ceramicist Magdalene Odundo and Abraham Thomas, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork’s curator of Fashionable structure, design and ornamental arts.
“What’s wonderful about this work is that it is made out of a transluscent horsehair that appears like wire or glass. The fabric has an enormous quantity of tensile energy and so the piece has this splendidly nervous high quality,” the style designer Jonathan Anderson tells The Artwork Newspaper throughout a podcast interview. Anderson, who’s Loewe’s inventive director and started the prize in 2016, provides that “what is absolutely magic is that once you stroll previous the work, it seems to maneuver barely because it catches the sunshine and shadows.”
The jury additionally chosen two additional shortlisted artists for particular mentions: Andile Dyalvane for the work Cornish Wall (2019), a pink earthenware coiled vessel influenced by each Xhosa tradition and the Cornish shoreline, and Julia Obermaier for the jewelry work Verborgen (2021).
All works by the 35 shortlisted artists are actually on present on the just lately opened Seoul Museum of Craft Artwork (SeMoCA) till 30 July.