“For many people, craft is a discovery. We are all in love with craft, and we want to make it, how do you say, contagioso!”

So said Sheila Loewe, the gregarious and ever-beaming president of the Loewe Foundation, which today opens its annual Craft Prize exhibition in Singapore’s sprawling National Gallery, marking the traveling showcase’s first time in Southeast Asia. In the nine years since its inception, the competition has become a beloved platform for preserving craft and creating community, and this year brought together 30 finalists from 19 countries and regions, including Haiti to Australia, chosen from over 5,100 submissions from 133 countries.

Following Jonathan Anderson’s departure from Loewe last year, newly incumbent co-creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez sat on the jury for the first time, and found plenty of energy and excitement—and some potential new collaborators—in the roster. “It’s impossible not to be inspired,” said Hernandez. “The beauty and the love of making things to the highest degree is so exciting and so rare these days, so to see someone spend a year on one object and make it so meticulously, to us that’s so inspiring as designers.” According to Sheila, the duo’s presence brings the prize a refreshing sense of vibrancy. “There is more color, which is something that you can see in the exhibition,” she said. “Jack and Lazaro are really in love with craft, and we couldn’t be happier to have them.”

Following extensive deliberation from the jury, this year’s prize went to experimental ceramic artist Jongjin Park for Strata of Illusion, a chair-like structure made by coating many sheets of paper in porcelain and layering them together in a captivating millefeuille of pastel tones that collapsed in on itself—an effect Park explained was unintentional and happened in the kiln. The jury was taken with the hard-soft duality of the work, combining the fragility of the paper with the structure of the porcelain. “It belied the true nature of its materiality and I think that’s why we felt that it is a testament to how expansive ceramics are,” said Abraham Thomas, curator of modern architecture, design, and decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Park’s win was announced by the Japanese-Korean singer Giselle, during a humid Singapore evening that brought together an energetic gaggle of vibrantly dressed attendees who sipped on champagne and cheered on the finalists. In addition to Park, who won the €50,000 prize money, South Korean artists had a strong presence overall in this year’s shortlist, with six finalists representing the nation. “Korea is really a very important country in contemporary craft. In other parts of the world, we have to explain what we think about craft and what we want to support and what we are concerned about,” said Loewe. “And in Korea, it’s not the case, we don’t have to teach them anything!”

Alongside the top prize, two special mentions went to Graziano Visintin, an Italian jewelry designer who made a pair of necklaces comprised of strings of delicate cubes made from thin sheets of gold, and a 3-meter-wide wall tapestry developed by the Ghana-based Baba Tree Master Weavers as “a living anthropological document” of Ghana’s Frafra communities. The piece was woven from elephant grass and made in collaboration with Spanish artist Álvaro Catalán de Ocón and used overhead drone photography to map the tapestry’s richly textured pattern.

These explorations of cultural heritage appeared alongside deconstructed forms and unexpected media combinations, which emerged as recurring themes throughout the shortlist. Chinese artist Nan Wei created a small crimson sculpture from lacquer, leather, and linen, while an arresting two-meter-tall conical structure by Japanese artist Nobuyuki Tanaka was created using kanshitsu, a dry lacquer technique that dates back over 1,300 years and lent the imposing form an inky depth.

The arc continued through glass: Australian glassblower Liam Fleming developed an anamorphic sculpture of black glass that began as a duo of stiff rectangular prisms that were twisted together inside the kiln, while Denmark-based, Russian-born artist Maria Koshenkova made a hanging sculpture with layers of found vintage glass that were stretched into a fleshy mass of translucent membranes that recalled the visceral intensity of a Francis Bacon painting—a process she explained was related to a sense of powerlessness and frustration. “Everything is so chaotic and complex…and through experimenting with glass I understand how little control we have, so this is an embodiment of that,” she said.

Across the many ages and geographies represented by the 30 artists, their respective practices each highlighted the increased poignancy and relevance of craft as we hurtle into the age of AI. “In this screen-based world of intangible pixels dominating our lives, these are all people interested in a physical relationship with the world who are using objects and touch and skill to connect us and tell stories with material,” said Deyan Sudjic, director emeritus of the Design Museum in London, who added that there have never been more submissions than there were this year.

The larger number of submissions has come with new artistic avenues, which Loewe says she welcomes with open arms. “If you see the pieces in the first edition [of the prize] and the pieces of this edition, there are some new windows that we have opened,” she said. “Some are closer to contemporary art, some closer to industrial, not only one type of traditional craft.” She highlighted work by Jobe Burns, a young artist from Walsall in the UK, who had transformed a steel sheet into a large cone that was sandblasted into a shiny red finish in the inner part and a brownish rust on the exterior.

As the prize itself has evolved, so too has the conversation around the blurring of boundaries between art and craft. The prize sits at a precious intersection of both, with a global scope and influence, combined with a passion and support that, conversely, feels cosily intimate. “I think [the prize] has changed the way that people see things,” said Sudjic. “It’s presented beautifully, it’s done with conviction, and there’s a sense of generosity. It feels like an authentic relationship.”

The Loewe Foundation Craft Prize exhibition is on view at the National Gallery Singapore until 14 June 2026.