At the 2026 edition of the Loewe Craft Prize, Korean artist Jongjin Park was awarded the top honour for Strata of Illusion, a quietly powerful ceramic work that transforms destruction into form. Presented at the National Gallery Singapore, the winning piece stood out for its experimental process. Selected from over 5,100 submissions worldwide, Park’s work signals a broader shift within contemporary craft, where imperfection, material tension and process-driven making are increasingly defining the conversation.
At first glance, Strata of Illusion resembles a monolithic seat or architectural fragment; it is austere, geometric, almost brutalist in silhouette. Yet the closer one moves toward it, the stranger it becomes. Thousands of layered sheets of paper, coated in coloured porcelain slip, form the body of the piece. During firing, the paper disappears entirely, surrendering to heat and gravity until the structure buckles in on itself. What remains is neither wholly ceramic nor entirely sculptural. It feels fossilised, as though time itself had compressed the object into existence.
What makes Park’s work so affecting is its resistance to perfection. The slumping edges and warped planes retain evidence of their own making, allowing chance to become a collaborator in the making process rather than an adversary. In a cultural moment obsessed with polish and precision, Strata of Illusion proposes that beauty can also emerge through surrender.
The jury echoed this sentiment, praising the work for “confounding expectations of what ceramics can be.” And indeed, the piece transcends disciplinary boundaries. Its layered construction evokes bookbinding, while the inflationary tension of its hollow form recalls glassblowing techniques. It is a ceramic object that behaves almost like architecture; it is structured yet vulnerable, engineered yet collapsing under its own weight.
There is also something deeply philosophical about the disappearance of the paper itself. The original material is annihilated in the kiln, leaving behind only its memory in porcelain. In many ways, the work becomes an elegy for process, defined as much by what is lost as by what survives.
“It’s made using paper clay, but the way it has been used defies its traditional application, where the primary focus is often on this sense of translucency. But here it was the solidity of the material [that stands out], and you only get a glimpse of the material because of the way the artist has engineered the collapsing of the form, and so you see the layers, almost like a layered cake,” smiles Magdalene Odundo.
“It is also the use of colour [that is striking] because a lot of paper clay work tends to be monochrome, and this has taken all the colours – admittedly pastels – but in a way that is very dynamically engineered to not be translucent. And it’s almost like a contemporary architectural project with its curved and deconstructed forms – this piece does that.”
As a celebrated maker working in clay herself, Odunde says judging a fellow craftperson’s work was not easy.
“Ceramic was such a big component in many of the applicants’ works, and clay itself seems to have become this very dominant material to use, which is so interesting as well. Being a clay person, I am very critical,” she laughs. “So I was one of the people who really looked inside to see the constructive element of the work. I also think it has a universal appeal; the piece has this curiosity, almost like it is a stack of forms, and then you draw closer, and everything is revealed.”
This year’s finalists collectively explored similar themes of instability, interruption and transformation. Across the exhibition, rigid systems softened into organic forms; woven surfaces carried traces of migration and memory; and materials traditionally associated with utility were elevated into speculative objects. Rather than presenting craft as preservation, the exhibited works display various forms of evolution; a living discipline continuously shaped by tension between heritage and experimentation.
Among the two special mentions, the collaborative work Frafra Tapestry by Baba Tree Master Weavers and Álvaro Catalán de Ocón was particularly resonant. Based on aerial views of traditional Gurunsi villages in Ghana, the monumental tapestry transformed architectural mapping into woven memory using elephant grass and ancestral basketry techniques. It felt less like an artwork and more like an archive suspended in textile form, preserving a threatened way of life through collective labour.
Equally captivating was Collier by Italian jeweller Graziano Visintin, whose necklaces comprised hundreds of miniature gold cubes treated with niello, an ancient metalworking technique. The result was astonishingly painterly: tiny abstract worlds linked together into wearable sculpture.
“For me, the link between the works is almost this sense of construction that is very architectural, the way of what is inside and outside. That contrast in the making process appears in all three of the works and techniques,” Odunde adds.
What continues to distinguish the Loewe Craft Prize is its insistence that craft is not secondary to contemporary art, but central to it. Since its inception, the prize has championed makers who understand material not merely as a medium, but as a language that is capable of carrying emotion, history and contradiction simultaneously.
This year’s exhibition, on view at the National Gallery Singapore until 14 June 2026, reinforces that position with remarkable clarity. Drawn from more than 5,100 submissions spanning 133 countries, the shortlisted works collectively demonstrate that the future of craft lies not in mastery alone, but in vulnerability and in allowing materials to fracture, bend, decay and transform.
And in Park’s winning work, perhaps that is the most enduring gesture of all: the understanding that collapse is not necessarily failure, but also an art form.
