International Awards for Art Criticism (IAAC) 11, 4-9 December 2025

The aim of these Awards is to support independent critical coverage of contemporary art, away from the immediate pressures of the market, media and private or state patronage. They seek to stimulate good writing, critical thinking, dialogue and research. They are judged anonymously in English, but are open to candidates from anywhere, writing in Chinese or English about any contemporary art exhibition held anywhere in the world over the previous twelve months.  There’s no age limit, and they are open to all. The objectivity of the selection process is underpinned by the recognised professionalism of the Chinese- and English-language jury members, and the strict anonymity of the judging process. 

The judging itself takes place in two stages – first, in China and the UK, by qualified local selectors (professional writers and critics); then, in the second and final stage, by a top-level international 5-person jury, which we hope you can be persuaded to join. I attach, for information, a list of all past international jury members and prize-winners.

Candidates for the Awards will be invited in the period from June to September 2025 to submit a critical review of an exhibition 1500 English words or 2,500 Chinese characters in length, plus or minus 10%. This must be a new piece of writing, which has not previously been published elsewhere; the word/character length will be strictly observed. The number and value of the Awards are as follows:

-        First Prize: 10,000 Euros pre-tax for a review, in Chinese or English and a fully funded trip to Shanghai or London, to attend one of the launch events connected with the Awards, in late May/early June 2026. Offered to the outstanding competitor, writing in either Chinese or English.

-        Three Equal Second Prizes of 3,500 Euros each, pre-tax, for a review in either Chinese or English                                                                                                           

-       20 reviews (10 each in Chinese and English) will be published, in the original language and in translation, in the eleventh issue of our ongoing series of digital and print publications, Exhibition Reviews Annual, in June 2026.

The Awards are jointly hosted by the International Awards for Art Criticism Ltd., London and School of Philosophy (Fudan University), Shanghai, the Royal College of Art, London and Edinburgh College of Art (University of Edinburgh), in association with the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), in Paris. The main sponsors are Fudan University, Shanghai, with the support of the Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum, funded by the Shanghai Jiushi Group.

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Press Release:

The 11th International Awards for Art Criticism (IAAC 11) Call for Submissions

On 7 June 2025, the 11^th edition of the International Awards for Art Criticism (IAAC 11) was officially launched at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, inviting submissions of art reviews in Chinese or English from around the globe. IAAC 11 is jointly organised by the IAAC Organising Committee, the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, and the Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum, with support from the Royal College of Art in London and the Edinburgh College of Art.

At the launch ceremony, Lewis Biggs, curator and member of the IAAC Organizing Committee, stated: ‘Over the past decade of IAAC, we are delighted to receive reviews from more than 50 different countries. I should say that I use the word “review” and “criticism” to mean the same thing – anyone who writes a review of an art exhibition is involved in art criticism. the practice of criticism is the same whether it is reviewing art, exhibitions, poems, films, architecture, theatre or political manifestos - in fact, any cultural production. The practice of criticism is closely related to education, to intelligence and creativity and to all that is positive in human affairs. Today, much art writing is limited to praise and does not engagewith questioning the art under review that it is useless. If art reviews were less bland, if they involved more thinking, they would have more effect. Like art itself - and the whole of cultural production - art criticism belongs to the symbolic world rather than to the first-order material world. We should not expect cultural production or cultural criticism to change the world directly. But culture and its criticism does change people. And then people change the material world. ’

Shen Yubing, Professor at the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, and Executive Dean of the Fudan University Art Research Institute, remarked: ‘The current art ecosystem faces dual crises: the dilution of local experiences under accelerated globalisation and the decline of criticism in the age of social media. We hope art criticism can shoulder three responsibilities: serving as a critical anchor, a translator of locality, and an agent of thought. Art criticism is not merely a tool to interpret works but a way to understand the world. Amid the torrents of globalisxation and locality, we envision IAAC as a vessel to reclaim the courage of criticism and the power of judgment.’

Hu Zhe, Deputy Director of the Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum, one of IAAC’s organizers, added:‘ Launching IAAC 11 at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts pays tribute to Lingnan’s artistic heritage while advancing global dialogue in art criticism. As an organiser, we aim to discover critiques that balance intellectual rigour with humanistic care, fostering artistic innovation and cultural exchange.

The IAAC 11 international jury comprises five members:

Alfredo Cramerotti, Curator, Writer, Publisher, Director of the Media Majlis Museum at Northwestern Qatar, and President of IKT

Ying KWOK, Senior Curator, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong

Ning OU, Artist, Curator, Writer, and Founder of ISOGLOSS (New York-based)

Filipa Ramos, Writer, Curator, and Lecturer at the Art Institute, FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel

Bernhard Schulz, Berlin-based Art Critic specialising in art, architecture, and cultural politics

The jury will anonymously select 20 shortlisted entries (10 in Chinese, 10 in English). Prizes include:

First Prize: 80,000 RMB (pre-tax) + residency in Shanghai or London

Second Prizes (3 winners): 30,000 RMB (pre-tax) each

Shortlisted works will be published bilingually in The 11th IAAC Exhibition Reviews Annual in summer 2026.

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Introduction To Jury Members For IAAC 11 (2025)

Alfredo Cramerotti

Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti holds a PhD in Communications, Design and Photography, He is Director of the Media Majlis Museum at Northwestern Qatar, specialising in contemporary art, media and digital culture. He is also President of IKT (International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art) and Chair of Digital Strategies for the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), Paris. The theoretical framework for his research integrates perspectives from aesthetic journalism, cultural studies and digital humanities, addressing contemporary debates on the convergence of art and technology. His curatorial practice encompasses major global art initiatives, including Manifesta 8 in Murcia, Cartagena, Spain (2008) and, more recently, Noor Riysdh, Art Dubai Digital, The Lumen Prize and the Maxxi Bulgari Prize. During his time as Senior Curator at Derby QUAD, UK (2008-11) and Director of Mostyn Art Gallery, Wales (2011-23) he organised over 100 institutional exhibitions. He has also co-curated four national and collateral exhibitions (Mauritius, Maldives, Malaysia and Wales) between 2013 and 2023 at the Venice Biennale. He has over 200 published texts to his name and five books, including Aesthetic Journalism (2009), Curating the Image (2020) and (forthcoming) The Possibility of an Image (2025). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Critical Photography book series (Intellect Books).

Ying KWOK

Ying KWOK is the Senior Curator at Tai Kwun Contemporary. Prior to her role at Tai Kwun, she worked as an independent curator from 2013 to 2021. Throughout her career, Kwok has worked with a diverse range of art and cultural institutions locally and internationally, from artists’ initiatives to art festivals, public museums and the commercial sector. She continuously synthesises different art forms in contemporary visual art, from site-specific commissions and performances to film and video.

Kwok’s past roles include: Guest Curator for the 5th Audemars Piguet Art Commission: The moon is leaving us by Phoebe Hui; and was the Festival Director of Peer to Peer: UK/HK 2020; Curator for Contagious Cities: Far Away, Too Close for Tai Kwun Contemporary and Wellcome Trust; the Lead Curator of LOOK International Photography Festival 2017; and Curator at M+ for Samson Young: Songs for Disaster Relief, as Hong Kong’s presentation at the 57th Venice Biennale. Before embarking on her freelancing career, Kwok was the curator at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester, UK, between 2006 and 2012.

In 2014, Kwok was awarded the Asia Cultural Council Fellowship. She is an international fellow in the Clore Leadership Programme 2018/19.

Ning OU

Ning OU is an artist, curator, and writer. His practises in different periods encompass literature, music, film, art, design, architecture, urban research, utopian study, rural reconstruction, and geographical soundscape. He is the director of two documentaries, San Yuan Li (2003) and Meishi Street (2006); he was the Chief Curator of the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (2009); the founding Editor-in-Chief of the literary bimonthly Chutzpah! (2010-2014); and the initiator and practitioner of the Bishan Project (2011-2016). He taught at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University in 2016-2017 and has been a senior researcher at the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR, Boston and Helsinki) since 2019. He moved to New York in 2022, and initiated the ISOGLOSS Collective in 2024, which will launch a multilingual online magazine, ISOGLOSS Review, in 2025.

Filipa Ramos

Filipa Ramos, PhD, is a Lisbon-born writer and curator whose research investigates art's relationship to ecology. She is Lecturer at the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, and Artistic Director of Loop, a Festival dedicated to artist’s films, spread out across the cultural and artistic venues of Barcelona. Ramos curated BESTIARI, the Catalan representation at the 60th Biennale di Venezia (2024). She co-founded the online artists’ cinema Vdrome. She runs the art and science festival The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish with Lucia Pietroiusti, with whom she also curated Songs for the Changing Seasons for the first Klima Biennale Wien (2024) and Persones Persons (8th Biennale Gherdëina, 2022). In 2021, she co-curated Bodies of Water, the 13th Shanghai Biennale. Ramos was Editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism (2013–20), Associated Editor of Manifesta Journal (2009–11) and contributed to Documenta 13 (2012) and 14 (2017). She edited Animals (Whitechapel Gallery/ MIT Press, 2016). Her upcoming book, The Artist as Ecologist(Lund Humphreys, 2025), discusses the ways in which contemporary artists embrace environmentalism.

Bernhard Schulz

Bernhard Schulz was born in Berlin (West) in 1953 and studied first Economics and Political Science, then Art History at the Free University from 1969 to 1971.

He was Assistant to the curatorial team for the Council of Europe’s 15th exhibition, Tendenzen der Zwanziger Jahre(Tendencies of the 20’s) in 1977. Since then, he has worked as Co-Curator for major exhibition projects, incl. Ich und die Stadt (I and the City) for the 750th Anniversary of the City of Berlin (1987).

Schulz started work as an art critic for newspapers and magazines in 1982, working for local newspapers and magazines and, from 1983, as arts correspondent for Handelsblatt (Düsseldorf) and Die Zeit (Hamburg); and from 1984 for Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin). From 1987 to 2020 he was co-editor of the cultural pages of Der Tagesspiegel, writing about art, architecture, cultural politics and history and briefly as editor of Political Book Section, 2016-2020.

From 1989 to 1999 he lectured at various Berlin Universities in Economics of Culture, Cultural Institutions, Cultural History of Post-War Germany.

2007-2013, he wrote for Speech architectural magazine (Moscow).

2011-2019, he wrote for The Art Newspaper (London).

2013-2018, he wrote for The German Times /Atlantic Times (Berlin).

From 1999 he was a contributor and  author, from 2020 co-editor of Kunstzeitung and Informationsdienst Kunst (both Berlin) until end of publication in late 2023 due to financial constraints.

2020 chief editor of bb2070, Magazine for Architecture and Urban Planning (Berlin, ceased publication due to the pandemic).

He writes free-lance on art, architecture, and cultural politics for various papers and magazines, e.g Tagesspiegel, Die Tageszeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bauwelt, Monopol Online.

From 1983 to the present, he has published numerous essays in anthologies and catalogues.