[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GettyImages-990356524.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tThe winner of the ninth\u00a0Nam June Paik\u00a0Prize is Japanese visual artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda. The biannual award comes with a \u20a950 million ($36,807) purse and a solo exhibition at the Nam June Paik Art Centre in Yongin, South Korea.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI am deeply honored to receive the Nam June Paik Prize. I had the privilege of meeting Nam June Paik in his later years, and his work continues to resonate with the questions behind my own,\u201d Ikeda said in a statement upon receiving the prize nomination.<\/p>\n
\n\tKnown for his explorations of sound, Ikeda began making music from digital audio glitches in the 1990s. His immersive 65-minute audiovisual performance\u00a0superposition<\/em>\u00a0(2012), which took place at the Barbican Centre and the\u00a0Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, considers our understanding of the natural world through quantum mechanics.<\/p>\n \n\tIn 2019, his large-scale digital projection and sound installation data-verse 1<\/em> premiered at the Venice Biennale. Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the piece turns open-source data from major scientific groups like NASA, CERN, and the Human Genome Project into a sensory experience.<\/p>\n \n\tIkeda\u2019s installations have been shown at arts institutions around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art\u00a0Tokyo, the Park Avenue Armory, the Centre Pompidou,\u00a0the Taipei\u00a0Fine Arts Museum, and 180 Studios in\u00a0London. Last year, he had shows at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the National Asian Culture Centre in Gwangju.<\/p>\n \n\tA committee and jury, including curators Cecilia Alemani, Naomi Beckwith, and John G. Hanhardt, were among those who chose Ikeda for the prize.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIkeda\u2019s future vision and relentless probing into emerging technologies, including data visualization, algorithmic processing, and signal theory, precisely resonate with the forward-thinking exploration Paik valorised,\u201d Ellen Pau, co-founder and artistic director of Videotage in Hong Kong and a member of the nomination committee, said.\u00a0\u201cIkeda has made incomprehensible infrastructures sensorially legible and opened up civic discourse around information, surveillance and scale.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHanhardt, a longtime interlocutor of Paik\u2019s and a former senior curator at New York\u2019s Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, who also served as the jury chair, explained, \u201cLike Nam June Paik, [Ikeda] is creating challenging and open opportunities to learn and experience hybrid aesthetic texts that become for the viewer an adventure, a contemplative space, and an opportunity to expand one\u2019s horizons of experience and knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAnother jury member, Sabine Himmelsbach, director of the House of Electronic Arts in\u00a0Basel, added that Ikeda \u201chas fundamentally reshaped the aesthetic language of media art through the integration of sound, data, mathematics, computation, and immersive installations. His practice of translating scientific and computational systems into profound aesthetic experiences extends Paik\u2019s experimental legacy into the age of data and algorithmic culture.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe prize was established in 2009 and is funded by the Gyeonggi Provincial Government. It is awarded biannually to an artist whose experimentation and innovation have furthered contemporary art. Previous winners include\u00a0Bruno Latour,\u00a0Doug Aitken,\u00a0Trevor Paglen,\u00a0and\u00a0Joan Jonas.<\/p>\n \n\tOn September 8, Ikeda will be honored at a ceremony, followed by a conversation with curator Sam Ozer. An exhibition of work by Ikeda is slated to open at the Nam June Paik Art Centre in 2027.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/ryoji-ikeda-wins-2026-nam-june-paik-prize-1234796672\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GettyImages-990356524.jpg?w=1024″] The winner of the ninth\u00a0Nam June Paik\u00a0Prize is Japanese visual artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda. The biannual award comes with a \u20a950 million ($36,807) purse and a solo exhibition at the Nam June Paik Art Centre in Yongin, South Korea. \u201cI am deeply honored to receive the Nam June Paik Prize. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2125988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2125988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125988\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2125988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2125988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2125988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}