Prestigious visual arts competition on show in Shanghai

One of the most influential visual arts competitions in the world, Arte Laguna Prize, is presenting its Asian debut exhibition at EKA Tianwu, a creative community hub in Jinqiao of Pudong in Shanghai through Dec 15.

The brainchild of the MoCA (modern and contemporary art) Cultural Association of Venice, Italy, Arte Laguna Prize is an international art competition dedicated to the visual arts, in particular painting, sculpture, photography, video art and performance, and virtual and digital art. It was founded in 2006 to give the opportunity to art talents, “more or less young, to emerge, to be noticed by the general public and by the jury composed of important names in the contemporary art scene,” according to Laura Gallon, founder of the prize.

More than 100 Arte Laguna Prize winning artists’ works are on exhibition. These artists come from all over the world, and “we are trying to connect them with China, and hope to transmit what is happening in the rest of the world,” Gallon said at the opening of the exhibition.

Huang Yi, curator of the exhibition in Shanghai, was a member of the academic committee of the competition in 2024 and 2025. He chose to present at the exhibition four of the 10 competitive categories of the Arte Laguna Prize: the painting, photography, digital art, and sculpture and installation.

“Maybe in the future, we could also have performance, video art, and some other types of art like design presented in Shanghai,” Gallon said.

Arte Laguna Prize decided to present its Asian debut in Shanghai “because we have the connection with the people of Eka, who have deep understanding and great sensitivity for contemporary art,” Gallon told the media.

EkaTianwu is a new urban renewal project covering a space of 40,000 square meters on the eastern bank of the Huangpu River. It used to be the site of the Shanghai Navigation Instrument Factory, whose predecessor was the Pudong Customs Factory established in 1869.

In 2021, work began to turn the 100-year-old factory compound intoan open-air architectural museum where more than 40 buildings of different styles are juxtaposed, featuring red bricks, raw concrete, bright metal sheets, and so on. The renovations were completed last year.