Loewe Craft Prize 2026: Jongjin Park's Porcelain Wins

Jongjin Park’s Strata of Illusion won the Loewe Craft Prize 2026 at National Gallery Singapore on 12 May with a paradox: a chair-shaped porcelain sculpture made from thousands of sheets of paper, folded and stacked into a block, then fired until the paper burned away and gravity warped the shell. Park, a 44-year-old Assistant Professor at Seoul Women’s University, took the €50,000 main prize and the silver trophy at a ceremony that drew the Loewe Foundation jury — fourteen judges including Deyan Sudjic, Patricia Urquiola, Frida Escobedo, Abraham Thomas and Loewe’s new co-creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez — to Singapore for the first time in the prize’s ten-year history. Two special mentions of €5,000 each went to Álvaro Catalán de Ocón with the Baba Tree Master Weavers of Ghana for Frafra Tapestry #2 (2024), and to Graziano Visintin for Collier (2025), a set of geometric gold necklaces inlaid with niello. The shape of the answer to “what won the Loewe Craft Prize 2026” is therefore not just a name but a method: paper as a kiln-fugitive substrate, porcelain slip as a skin, gravity as the final hand.

What Jongjin Park Made: Strata of Illusion at National Gallery Singapore

The winning work is a chair-like object, and the word “like” is doing the load-bearing labour. Park does not throw or coil. He cuts paper into sheets, dips each sheet into tinted porcelain slip until the cellulose is saturated, folds the wet, slip-heavy sheets, and stacks them — thousands of them — into a dense rectilinear block roughly the proportions of a low cube. Then he carves the block into the suggestion of a chair: a seat, a back, two arms. Then he fires it.

In the kiln, two things happen simultaneously. The paper carbonises and burns away, leaving only the porcelain skin that had clung to each sheet — a stratified ghost. And the porcelain itself, no longer supported by the rigid paper armature, slumps under its own weight. Walls bow. Edges droop. The block that went into the kiln as an orthogonal sculpture comes out as something visibly geological, with the striations of sedimentary rock and the soft collapse of a slow-motion landslide. The colour comes from the slip — Park tints it in iron oxide reds, cobalt blues, manganese browns — and the layers read across the fired surface like a cross-section through a cliff face.

There are no glazes. There is no second firing for decoration. The chromatic and structural intelligence is loaded into the slip and the stacking before the kiln gets the work. This is the technical claim Park has been refining since his MFA at Kookmin University in Seoul: that the firing process can be conscripted as a co-author, that destruction inside the kiln can be the formative gesture rather than the failure mode. He extended that argument through a PhD at Kookmin and a second period of study at Cardiff Metropolitan University, where the British studio-ceramics tradition runs against the East Asian wheel-throwing inheritance he had carried from Korea. The hybrid is visible in Strata of Illusion. The form is industrial-modernist — a chair, a Donald Judd cube, a piece of architecture — but the surface is wholly mineral, with the kind of accidental marbling that you cannot draw on paper. The work refuses to choose between sculpture and furniture, between Korean craft and British studio practice, between intention and accident.

Park has been working in this paper-porcelain method for roughly a decade. Strata of Illusion is the 2025 iteration he submitted in late 2025 to the Loewe Foundation; it is dated 2025 because the firing was completed that year, but Park considers the technique itself an ongoing series rather than a sequence of discrete objects. The jury saw a finalist-stage version installed in the National Gallery Singapore galleries before voting on 12 May. The ceremony itself was small by Loewe standards — no runway, no spectacle, a museum auditorium and a podium — and the trophy is the same silver Loewe-foundation piece every winner since 2017 has received. The prize money lands in Park’s account in a single tranche.

What changes for Park, in the prize’s wake, is not the bank balance but the visibility. Strata of Illusion and a small body of related works will travel inside the finalist exhibition at National Gallery Singapore from 13 May to 14 June 2026, and the Loewe Foundation has digitised every finalist work for “The Room,” its virtual access platform, where the sculptures can be rotated and inspected at resolution unavailable in the physical galleries. Park’s gallery representation is likely to consolidate around the win — the historical pattern from previous laureates suggests two to three new institutional commissions inside eighteen months — and Korean public museums, which had collected him only lightly before, will move.

Loewe Craft Prize 2026: How the Jury Read the Field

The 2026 edition was the largest by submission count in the prize’s history: 5,100 entries from 133 countries, narrowed by the experts panel to 30 finalist works from 19 countries and regions. The finalist field is the meaningful unit of analysis — the longlist is too large to read, the winner is a single data point, but the 30 finalists tell you what a serious jury thinks the contemporary craft conversation looks like in a given year. In 2026 that conversation skewed hard toward material extremity: works that took a single substrate and tortured it past its normal tolerance.

The jury composition, fourteen names, suggests how this happened. Deyan Sudjic, formerly of the Design Museum London, brings the curatorial reflex for objects that argue with themselves. Patricia Urquiola, whose practice runs through Cassina, Moroso and B&B Italia, reads craft through industrial production — she is alert to surface and tactility but suspicious of preciousness. Frida Escobedo, the Mexican architect on the Met’s Tang Wing rebuild, brings a sensibility tuned to mass, weight, and quasi-geological form. Abraham Thomas, the Daniel Brodsky Curator of Modern Architecture, Design, and Decorative Arts at the Met, has been pushing for craft to be read as architecture’s twin discipline rather than its decorative supplement. McCollough and Hernandez, the Proenza Schouler co-founders who took the Loewe co-creative-director seats in 2025, were on the jury for their first edition; their presence signals the foundation’s intent to keep the prize aligned with the house’s design programme even after the transition.

The two special mentions clarify the jury’s argument. Frafra Tapestry #2, the Baba Tree Master Weavers’ collaboration with Madrid-based designer Álvaro Catalán de Ocón, abstracts satellite imagery of a Frafra village in northeastern Ghana into a woven tapestry — straw, dyed plant fibres, the basket-weaving vocabulary that Baba Tree has been industrialising since the 1990s, but pushed up to wall-scale and pixelated as if read from low orbit. Catalán de Ocón is best known for the PET Lamp project, which since 2011 has translated the basket-weaving traditions of Colombia, Chile, Ethiopia, Ghana and elsewhere into lighting that uses plastic-bottle warp threads; the Frafra Tapestry extends his collaborative method into pure textile, and the special mention is the prize’s first recognition of a Ghanaian collective. The second special mention, Graziano Visintin’s Collier, is the Padua-school goldsmith doing what the Padua school does — gold inlaid with niello in tight geometric fields, necklaces that read as wearable architecture — but at a scale and reduction that argued for jewellery as serious craft rather than decoration. Visintin has been making this kind of work for forty years; the prize is a late and overdue institutional acknowledgement.

What the jury seems to have rewarded in Park’s win, against the two special mentions and the broader finalist field, is the willingness to relinquish authorial control at the final moment. Catalán de Ocón and Visintin both produce work in which the maker’s hand remains visible end-to-end: the weave is the weaver’s, the inlay is the goldsmith’s. Park gives the last forty percent of the work to the kiln and to gravity. The thesis of Strata of Illusion is that the most interesting contemporary craft is the craft that knows when to stop intervening. This is a thesis the prize has been quietly building toward since Eriko Inazaki’s Metanoia won in 2023 — Inazaki’s accreted ceramic similarly delegates its final form to a glacial accretion process — and Park’s win consolidates it.

The field this year also reflected the prize’s shift toward East Asian ceramic and textile traditions reinterpreted through contemporary studio practice. The Wallpaper and Designboom coverage from Singapore both noted that the finalist exhibition, taken as a whole, read as an argument for craft as a research discipline rather than a heritage holding pattern. W Magazine’s framing was sharper: the prize, ten years in, has stopped being about craft revivalism and become a site for material risk-taking.

Loewe Craft Prize Winners 2017–2026

Read across the table, three patterns surface. First, the geographic distribution is heavily skewed toward East Asia. Japan has won three editions outright (2019, 2023, 2025), South Korea two (2022, 2026), and China one (2021). That is six of nine awarded editions for East Asian makers, against two for Europe (Germany 2017, UK 2018) and one for the Americas (Mexico 2024). The prize was founded by a Northern Irish creative director of a Spanish house owned by a French conglomerate, and after a decade it has become — by jury choice, not by submission geography — a referendum on East Asian studio practice. The COVID-postponed 2020 edition reinforces rather than disturbs the pattern: Fanglu Lin’s She, announced in 2021, was the first non-European winner and inaugurated the East Asian streak.

Second, the materials are narrowing. The first four winners (2017–2021) worked in distinct substrates — oak, stoneware, urushi-on-foam, knotted textile. The last five (2022–2026) include three ceramics (Inazaki, Anza, Aoki), one ceramic-paper hybrid (Park), and one horsehair work (Jeong) that is technically a ceramic-adjacent practice given how the 500-year-old gat-making technique is structured. Ceramic and ceramic-cognate work has become the prize’s centre of gravity. This is partly a function of jury composition — Urquiola, Escobedo, Thomas all read ceramic with particular fluency — and partly a function of the contemporary craft field itself, which has been undergoing a ceramic renaissance since the early 2010s that the prize did not invent but has helped to canonise.

Third, the rhetoric of the winning works has moved. The 2017 and 2018 winners — Gamperl’s turned oak, Lee’s hand-coiled stoneware — read squarely inside the heritage-traditional axis: the work is what a master maker can extract from a familiar material with virtuoso technique. The 2023, 2024 and 2026 winners — Inazaki’s accreted Metanoia, Anza’s hand-built ceramic densities, Park’s paper-porcelain — are material-conceptual: the work is what happens at the boundary of the technique’s tolerance, where intention runs out and the material starts authoring itself. The shift from traditional virtuosity to material-conceptual extremity is the prize’s quiet curatorial argument, and Park’s win is its clearest statement to date.

Why Jonathan Anderson’s 2016 Prize Still Defines Loewe in 2026

Jonathan Anderson founded the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2016, three years into his tenure as Loewe creative director (2013–2024). The prize was not a marketing initiative grafted onto a fashion house; it was an institutional argument that craft, broadly defined, was the substrate on which the house’s contemporary identity would be built. The Loewe Foundation itself had been established in 1988 by Enrique Loewe Knappe — the fourth generation of the founding family — as a cultural arm with poetry and photography programmes; Anderson, arriving in 2013, redirected the foundation’s centre of gravity toward making. The Craft Prize was the institutional vehicle.

The house’s underlying numbers explain why this move was strategically coherent rather than performatively cultural. Loewe was founded in Madrid in 1846 as a leather-goods workshop; LVMH took a majority stake in 1996 and bought the house outright shortly thereafter. By 2013, when Anderson arrived, Loewe was a respected but small entry in the LVMH portfolio, doing roughly €200 million in annual revenue against billion-euro siblings. Anderson’s eleven-year tenure, and the Craft Prize that accompanied it, took Loewe to an estimated €1.6 billion in 2023 — an eight-fold scale jump that the LVMH leadership has repeatedly described, in investor calls, as the model for how a smaller house can be grown without diluting brand specificity. The Craft Prize was a load-bearing piece of that growth: it gave the house an annual, institutionally credible cultural moment that had no direct commercial output (no capsule collection, no co-branded handbag) and therefore could not be read as marketing. Reviewers covered the prize as they would the Turner or the Hugo Boss Prize.

The 2024 departure of Anderson — he left Loewe to take the creative director seat at Dior — triggered the question that any prize tied to a founder faces: does it survive the founder’s exit? In Loewe’s case, the answer was institutional rather than personal. The foundation, run by Sheila Loewe, retained continuity. The jury composition rotates but consistently includes outside curators and architects rather than only Loewe insiders. And the appointment of Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez as Loewe’s co-creative directors in 2025 — part of the broader eleven-house creative-director reshuffle of 2025–2026 that touched every major European holding company — was made by LVMH in part because the Proenza Schouler co-founders had a parallel commitment to craft as serious cultural infrastructure. Their presence on the 2026 jury, in their first prize cycle, signals continuity rather than reset.

What Park’s win does, in the year that the house turns its first page after Anderson, is reaffirm the prize as Loewe’s most stable cultural institution. The handbags will change. The runway aesthetic will change — McCollough and Hernandez bring a markedly different vocabulary to Loewe than Anderson did, more architectural, less folkloric. But the Craft Prize, ten editions in, will keep arriving every year, will keep being judged by a rotating fourteen-person panel, will keep going to material-conceptual makers working at the edges of their disciplines. For a fashion house in 2026, that kind of institutional stability is rarer than it sounds. Chanel, Dior, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga and Gucci are all running new creative directors with new mandates and new commercial pressures. Loewe is running new creative directors against a cultural backbone that survives the transition. The Craft Prize is what that backbone is made of.

Park’s Strata of Illusion is, in this reading, both a winning sculpture and a piece of Loewe’s cultural-asset stack. The €50,000 cheque and the silver trophy are the visible transaction. The longer transaction is that Park’s name is now permanently catalogued inside Loewe’s ten-year canon, alongside Gamperl, Lee, Ishizuka, Lin, Jeong, Inazaki, Anza and Aoki — a roster that, taken together, has become the most coherent institutional argument any luxury house has made about craft in the twenty-first century. The argument is paradoxical, because the house is owned by LVMH and therefore by a conglomerate whose revenue depends on objects that are explicitly not craft: the leather-goods category, the cosmetics category, the wine category, all of which are industrialised at scale. Loewe’s claim, via the prize, is that the conglomerate can sustain a serious cultural commitment that runs orthogonal to its own business model. Park’s win, in May 2026 in Singapore, is the tenth annual proof.

The chair-shaped porcelain in the National Gallery Singapore gallery — paper that has burned away, slip that has slumped, colour that has marbled itself across stratified layers — is therefore both itself and a synecdoche. It is what won the Loewe Craft Prize 2026. It is also what the prize, ten years in, is for: a single object every year that argues, against the structural logic of the luxury industry that funds it, that the most serious contemporary making happens at the boundary where the maker stops and the material continues.