Hong Kong Students Prize

Corey Andrew Barr joined Art Central as Fair Director in 2019. A champion of Hong Kong artists, Barr has expanded the Fair’s platform to highlight local talent and underscore its position as a benchmark for aspiring galleries from around the world. He was formerly the director of a prominent Hong Kong- and London-based gallery focusing on contemporary Asian art, and prior to that, served as Specialist and Head of Sales for Phillips in New York, where he also organized exhibitions of contemporary art, photography, and design by leading international artists.

Howard Bilton is Chairman and founder of The Sovereign Group. Howard holds a joint honours BA degree in classics and law from the University of Keele and is qualified as a Barrister and called to the Bars of England/Wales and Gibraltar.  

He is a visiting non-resident professor at Texas A and M University where he assists with their LLM and Masters degrees in International Tax and Offshore Centres.  

In 2003 he formed The Sovereign Art Foundation (SAF) which runs a range of art prizes designed to increase the exposure of artists in the region, while raising money to help disadvantaged children.  

SAF has raised over US$11 million which has been used to help thousands of disadvantaged children using expressive arts as a means of education and rehabilitation.  

Howard has a personal art collection comprising around 420 pieces made by a wide range of artists from students to internationally famous artists.   

He has acted as a judge on various Sovereign sponsored art prizes in Hong Kong, Bahrain, Gibraltar, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, London, Malta, Mauritius, Portugal and Singapore.  He has also acted as a nominator for the Sovereign professional prizes in Africa and Portugal. 

Howard is the Founder and Chairman of Howard’s Folly Wines, Portugal. All wines use art on the labels and often feature work by finalists of the various Sovereign art prizes or children taught by SAF. A proportion of the revenue from wine sales goes to support SAF. 

Independent Art & Cultural Practitioner
Master of Art (Human Resource Management), McQuarie University, Australia
Examiner/Assessor, Hong Kong Arts Development Council
Co-opted Member, Leisure & Cultural Services Department
Video Artist

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Shivang Jhunjhnuwala started his career in video production shortly after graduating from University. In 2020 Him and Alexander Glavatsky-Yeadon co-founded Young Soy Gallery together in order to support emerging artists during the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, Jhunjhnuwala has collaborated with a wide range of radical artists from all around the globe. In 2023, Jhunjhnuwala, co-founded another brand called VAIN Projects which aims to work with more established artists that have outgrown their emerging states. In 2024 he began working for Ovolo Hotels and Trio Capital in various creative and strategic roles.

Hong Kong Canadian interdisciplinary artist Michelle Fung’s lifelong interdisciplinary oeuvre revolves around a grand dystopian world-building narrative in the year 2084. Her awards include the 2024 Sovereign Asian Art Prize Vogue Hong Kong Women’s Art Prize and semifinalist for the Print Center’s 98th Annual International Competition (Philadelphia, USA.) She had a recent solo exhibition at the Hong Kong Art Centre, the national Art Gallery Boris Georgiev, Bulgaria and has held solo exhibitions at leading galleries in Australia and California, as well as the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her short films have been selected at many international film festivals, and she has participated in international residencies including in China, the Arctic Circle, International Territory of Svalbard, USA and Canada.