Jongjin Park, a Seoul-based ceramicist and professor, has won the 2026 LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize, announced at a ceremony in Singapore on 12 May 2026. His winning work, Strata of Illusion (2025), is a sculpture built from paper and porcelain slip — hundreds of thin, transformed layers that read as geological formation one moment and folded paper the next. The prize carries €50,000, with two special mention awards of €5,000 each.
The ceremony marked the first time the LOEWE Foundation has held the award in Singapore, and it opened the finalist exhibition at the National Gallery Singapore, which runs from 13 May to 14 June 2026. Thirty finalists from twenty countries and regions made the exhibition, spanning ceramics, textiles, furniture, woodwork, metalwork, jewellery, lacquer and glass — the prize's widest possible reading of craft, assembled by a jury of museum directors, curators and designers from works submitted worldwide.
Park's win matters beyond the prize money. His signature technique — dipping paper in porcelain slip and firing it so the paper burns away leaving a fragile ceramic shell — collapses the line between the handmade object and the natural process, and it rewards close, slow looking. That a material experiment rather than a display of technical finish took the top award says something encouraging about where contemporary craft's biggest institutions are pointing, a direction craft criticism has argued for across recent editions.
For UK makers, the mechanics matter too: entries for future editions open through the LOEWE Foundation's craft prize website, with the shortlist drawn from an open international call. The 2026 finalists' exhibition remains at the National Gallery Singapore until 14 June 2026, with the full list of works published on the prize's site.
