The South Korean ceramicist wins the 2026 LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize with Strata of Illusion, a fragile, collapsed form made from paper, porcelain, fire, and time
Craft is often misunderstood as something stable: a hand, a material, a technique, a finished object. But at its most interesting, it does the opposite. It makes matter behave strangely. It asks what a material can become when pushed past its expected limits.
That is what gives Jongjin Park’s work its quiet force. The South Korean ceramicist has been named the winner of the 2026 LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize for Strata of Illusion, a paper-and-porcelain sculpture that looks both built and eroded, solid and impossibly delicate. Selected from 30 finalists and more than 5,100 submissions from around the world, Park receives the prize’s €50,000 award.
At first, Strata of Illusion appears almost archaeological: a partially collapsed, seat-like form marked by layered surfaces, shifts of colour, and the feeling of something found rather than made. But its process is highly deliberate. Park stacks thousands of layers of paper, soaks them in coloured ceramic slip, then fires the work at high temperatures. In the kiln, the paper burns away, leaving behind a porcelain trace — an object shaped as much by disappearance as by construction.
That tension is what makes the work so compelling. It is ceramic, but it refuses the usual heaviness associated with clay. It is sculptural, but it carries the softness and memory of paper. It seems functional, almost like a chair, then collapses that promise into something more unstable. The object holds onto the evidence of labour while also looking as if nature, gravity, and time have had their say.
The prize was presented in Singapore, where the LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize exhibition brings together works by the 30 shortlisted artists at the National Gallery Singapore. This year’s edition marks the prize’s first presentation in Southeast Asia, with finalists from 19 countries working across ceramics, textiles, metal, glass, lacquer, and other material languages.
Park’s win also says something about where contemporary craft is heading. The most exciting work in the field is no longer easily separated from sculpture, design, architecture, or conceptual art. It lives in the blur between skill and experiment — where a traditional material is treated not as heritage to be preserved untouched, but as a system to be questioned.
Special mentions went to Graziano Visintin and Baba Tree Master Weavers, whose works extend that same sense of craft as cultural intelligence rather than decoration. Together, the finalists suggest a world where making still matters precisely because so much else has become frictionless.
Photos: Loewe