The 2025 Sovereign Asian Art Prize

Sangeeta Thapa founded Siddhartha Art Gallery in 1987 with eminent artist Shashikala Tiwari. She has curated over 600 shows of Nepali and international artists. She regularly gives consultations to collectors of Nepali art and initiates community art projects. She served on the Board of Patan Museum for six years and is a Fellow of the De Vos Institute of Arts Management. In 2009, she launched Nepal’s premier art event The Kathmandu International Arts Festival (KIAF) as a tri-annual event. In 2011, she established the Siddhartha Arts Foundation as a non-profit and organized the second edition of the Kathmandu International Arts Festival in 2012, through the Foundation.

In 2016, Ms. Thapa co-curated the first exhibition of contemporary Nepali art at the Moesgaard Museum in Arhus, Denmark.

In 2015, the Great Earthquakes struck Nepal causing a huge loss of lives and damage to homes and heritage sites. Taking this into account the third iteration of the Festival was postponed to 2017. In 2016, the Foundation decided to morph the Festival into a Triennale format and was recognized by the Biennale Foundation in Italy. The 2017 edition was curated by Philippe Van Cauteren from the S.M.A.K. Museum in Ghent, Belgium. The 2020 edition was also postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic and took place in March 2022. The edition was led by the artistic director Cosmin Constinas from Para Site Hong Kong and Nepali curators Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hitman Gurung.

In 2021 , as a precursor to to the Triennale a selection of the works were showcased at Para Site Hong Kong. Post the Triennale a selection of the works were showcased at SAAVY contemporary in Berlin. In the same year the Siddhartha Arts Foundation served as the co commissioner of the Nepal Pavilion at the Venice Biennale which featured the works of Ang Tsherin Sherpa. In December 2022 the Siddhartha Art Foundation showcased works by Nepali artists at the Kochi Biennale.

Ms. Thapa is the publisher of four volumes of poetry: Khulla Dhoka, Nirantar Khulla Dhoka, A Thousand Earths Thousand Skies, and Even the Moonlight can Burn. She has written a book on the drawings of Nepali artist Manuj Babu Mishra entitled ‘In the Eye of the Storm’ and has written essays on contemporary Nepali art in the Gallerie Magazine (India) and for the Nepal Art Now exhibition catalog printed by the Welt Museum, Vienna. She has also contributed her essays to Telling a Tale, a publication of women’s’ narratives, Nukta Art Magazine (Pakistan), and the VOW Magazine in Nepal. Ms. Thapa has been invited in the capacity of a speaker to Art Basel Hong Kong, New North-South Dialogue organized by the British Council and Manchester University in Sri Lanka, the Asian Curatorial Forum Dhaka, and to a panel on South Asian art organized by the Habiart Foundation, New Delhi.

In 2023, she received the President’s medal ‘Kala Sumbardhak Award’ for her contribution to uplifting and supporting the arts scene in the country and in the same year received the ‘Kala Prabhandak Award’ from the Nepal Academy of Fine Arts in recognition for promoting the arts of the country over 35 years.

Adeel uz Zafar is an artist, curator and art educator. Zafar holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from National College of Arts, Lahore. Zafar’s works have been featured in several national and international exhibitions including 11 solo shows and numerous group shows. He has also presented works in international art fairs and participated in both national and international residencies. He is represented by FOST Gallery, Singapore & Aicon Contemporary, NY. Zafar currently serves as a Faculty member at IVS,Karachi. Two of his nominees Ahmed Javed & Sameen Agha was awarded SAAP in 2019 & 2024. www.adeeluzzafar.com

Amra Ali is a Karachi based art critic and curator. She has been writing reviews and essays in local and international publications on art in Pakistan since 1900. She is a co-founder of Nukta Art, a first bi annual publication on art in Pakistan. She has been the secretary of AICA Pakistan, a subsidiary of the International art critics association, Paris. Amra has many curatorial projects to her credit, among them is the mini retrospective of Rasheed Araeen, titled, ‘Homecoming Rasheed Araeen’ in 2014-15, at the VM Gallery. She has edited the publication, Rasheed Araeen, Homecoming. The emphasis of her curatorial work is to locate links between her critique viz a viz gallery spaces.

Carlos Quijon, Jr. is an art historian, critic, and curator based between New York and Manila. He is a fellow of the research platform Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia (MAHASSA), convened by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories project. He writes exhibition reviews for Artforum and has essays published in e-flux, frieze, ArtReview Asia among others, and his research is part of the book From a History of Exhibitions Towards a Future of Exhibition-Making (Sternberg Press, 2019). He is the curator of the Philippine Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.

Portia Placino is a curator and independent arts writer based in Manila, Philippines. She currently runs the JCB Gallery at Philippine Women’s University. Her writings appeared in ArtAsiaPacific, ArtReview, ArtSG, Art+ Magazine, Spot.ph, Esquire Philippines, and several local and international academic publications. She received research and writing residencies and grants in the Philippines, Germany, Korea, and Belgium. She scrutinizes and situates marginal and off-center art practices including regional contemporary art, feminist perspectives, and sociopolitical currents in her curatorial work. Her writing projects examine the position of contemporary art in an embattled society. https://portiaplacino.com/

Lisa Botos has built a global career delivering art and culture for diverse entities, from foundations to artists to nations, including Swire, WYNG Foundation, and the Kingdom of Bhutan. In Hong Kong, she co-founded OOI BOTOS gallery and Art Unchained. In 2013, she served as guest curator for the Vladivostok Biennale of Visual Arts. As a senior editor at TIME, Lisa led an award-winning photo department. A founding partner of the advisory Private Partners & Co., Lisa counsels families on cultural legacy. She holds an MA with honors in international communication, focusing on visual culture, from American University, and is a fellow of Hong Kong University’s ACLP and BeFantastic ArtTech. Read more here.

Naima Morelli is an arts writer and journalist specialized in contemporary art from Asia-Pacific and the MENA region.

She has written for the Financial Times, Al-Jazeera, The Art Newspaper, ArtAsiaPacific, Internazionale and Il Manifesto, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Plural Art Mag, Middle East Monitor and Middle East Eye as well as writing curatorial texts for galleries.
She is the author of three books on Southeast Asian contemporary art. www.naimamorelli.com

Born and raised in 1980,Tehran, Iran, Sheida Ghomashchi works as an independent curator in Milan, Italy. She has been part of various projects including: Co-curator of “Dixit Algorizmi, The Garden of Knowledge”, the fisrt natioonal pavilion of Uzbekistan in Venice Biennale of Art, 2022.

Co- Curator of “ Dixit Algorizmi”, International exhibition, CCA, Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 2021. Fellow at Floating University, Forensic Architecture Group, Berlin, Germany. Curator of “Archive Alive!”, Exhibition of Ramak Fazel, Kandovan, Pejman Foundation, Tehran, Iran. Fellow of “Ideas City – Detroit”, New Museum of New York, USA. Researcher in Urban Research program, BAUHAUS, Dessau, Germany.

Shormi A. is an art practitioner from Hong Kong. She was the Head of Arts at Duddell’s Hong Kong and has executed several public art projects including Carnival – fundraiser for Amnesty International HK (Hong Kong), Art in the Bar for CoBo Social (Hong Kong). She curated Code Blue at the Taipei Contemporary Art Centre and co-curated 在／不在 | Negation of You (Taipei) at Nanhai Art Gallery. She studied at the University of Hong Kong and completed her MA in Curatorial Studies at the National Taipei University of Education (Taiwan). https://www.behance.net/shormia

Sofia is an independent curator, researcher and art advisor who holds a Masters of Asian Art Histories from Goldsmiths University of London through LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. She spent over a decade in Southeast Asia, working in both the institutional and commercial realms of the regional arts ecosystem. Sofia is now based in London where she co-founded Art World Database, an online platform for Southeast Asian contemporary art, whilst also curating exhibitions with Peruke Projects, an art consultancy presenting curatorial projects for international contemporary artists. www.perukeprojects.com, www.artworlddatabase.com

Tanya is the co-founder of the website ArtWorldDatabase.com, a website dedicated to promoting and supporting Southeast Asian contemporary art. Before moving to London in 2020, she lived and worked in Singapore for 11 years where worked as an independent curator and published art writer. She holds a Masters degree from Goldsmiths University of London in Asian Art Histories and is dedicated to working with artists living in the diaspora and presenting curatorial projects as part of the Peruke Projects team. www.artworlddatabase.com

Daryl Goh is a startup-advisor, angel investor and art critic/collector who holds 2 Masters Degrees and authored Design Innovation for Everyone (2023). Daryl is also the designer behind Asia’s first-ever phy-gital retail experience – Zhuang: Home of Singapore Designers that kickstarted an industry trend towards digital retail spaces. The technopreneurship & fashion scholar previously started Singapore’s first free art residency, NPE Art Residency and has judged for multiple prominent art awards. www.darylgoh.com

Seet Yun Teng is a Singapore-based curator, producer, and writer. A keen alignment to the material world and embodied processes underlies her approach. With an interest in alternative formats of exhibition-making and interdisciplinary collaborations, she has curated and produced across a range of exhibitions, events and platforms. These include Appetite, Arts-Business x Business-Arts Residencies, Feelers, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, Supernormal, and Constance Howard Gallery and Goldsmiths Textile Collection London, amongst others. She received an Honourable Mention (Curator Category) in the 2021 IMPART Awards. www.yuntengseet.com

For 40 years, Gun Soo Choi has been an image critic, photographer, and university professor. he has published 12 photographic books and held 10 individual exhibitions.

Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1969, she majored in painting at Seoul National University, Seoul, photography design at Hongik University, Seoul, and studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York, USA.

As a winner of the Daum Prize in 2006, she held a successful solo exhibition at Kumho Museum of Art in South Korea, and ‘The Pink and Blue Project‘ book was published by the Parkgeonhi Foundation (Seoul, South Korea) in 2007, and ‘Animal Companions’ book was published by IANN publisher (Seoul, South Korea) in 2015.

Also, In 2011, She won the first Prize at The Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Hong Kong with ‘The Pink & Blue Project II’, and the Ilwoo Photography Award in Seoul, South Korea. www.jeongmeeyoon.com

Brian Curtin is an Irish-born art critic and lecturer. From 2007-18 he worked as an independent curator of contemporary art and now works on commission. He holds a Ph.D. in studio art from the University of Bristol and has been based in Bangkok since 2000. He has lectured in art history, visual culture, and studio courses at the Faculty of Architecture of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, since 2006. Brian is one of the curatorial team for the Bangkok Art Biennale 2024. www.brianacurtin.com

Jiandyin, interdisciplinary duo artists and curators, live and work in Ratchaburi, Thailand, grantees of the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship, New York, 2009, invited committees of 22nd Silpa Bhirasri Creativity Grants, Art Centre Silpakorn University, Thailand. Exhibitions include: 2024 FutureOurs Art2030, New York, Nomadic, Jim Thompson Art Center, Thailand, 2024 Jakarta Biennale, Indonesia, 2021 Busan Sea Art Festival, South Korea, 2019 Asian Art Biennial, Taichung, Taiwan. They found Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture, a non-profit artist initiative, located in Ratchaburi, Thailand, recently participated in Thailand Biennale Chiang Rai, 2023 and documenta fifteen, 2022, Germany.

jiandyin.com, baannoorg.org

Sakda Chantanavanich is a Bangkok-based collector deeply engaged with Thailand’s contemporary art scene. For nearly a decade, he has been a key supporter of artists, collectives, curators, and art spaces, including Speedy Grandma and Waiting You Curator Lab, through funding for production, activities, and exhibitions. Committed to fostering artistic freedom, Sakda prioritizes collecting works of less conventional media on themes of environmental issues and social concerns by young and pre-emerging artists from Thailand and Southeast Asia. His collection includes works from Ruangsak Anuwatwimon, Aracha Cholitgul, Chris Chong Chan Fui, Ho Rui An, and Chulayarnnon Siriphol.

Matt A Hanson is an art writer, freelance journalist and editor from Massachusetts, based in Istanbul since 2016. He has participated in the editorial productions of every major cultural institution in Turkey, including Salt, Arter, Sakip Sabancı Museum, Istanbul Modern, and a host of others, while producing a regular variety of articles on topics ranging from literature in translation to the history of minorities. As a contributor to ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, ARTnews, Artnet News, Hyperallergic and many leading arts and culture publications internationally, he covers the art world as the result of critical and long-term community engagement in Turkey, Europe, America and beyond. www.fictivemag.com