The 2025 Outstanding Art Prize exhibition is being held at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (KdMoFA) until October 26, showcasing TNUA students’ creative and research abilities.
Li Jhao-Ci’s “Succumbing to the Will of the Victor” won this year’s Outstanding Art Prize and the artist will be given the opportunity to hold a solo exhibition at KdMoFA next year.
Co-organized by the School of Fine Arts and the KdMoFA, the 2025 Outstanding Art Prize received 50 entries from TNUA’s undergraduate and graduate students. After an initial and secondary review by an invited panel of professors, experts, and scholars, nine works were selected. The winner was announced at the opening ceremony of the exhibition on August 29.
TNUA President Prof. Hsi-Chuan Liu noted at the opening ceremony that the Outstanding Art Prize was established in 2005 to encourage creativity and dialogue among young artists. Prof. Liu said that over the years, the students have demonstrated remarkable strength and rich creative achievements, revealing the aspirations, practices and future prospects of the new generation of artists.
KdMoFA Director Meng-Hung Su noted that this year's Outstanding Art Prize not only showcases new trends of contemporary art, but also reveals the vibrant and distinctive self-expressions of the new generation of creators. It is hoped that the art prize can continue to be a platform for dialogues and exchanges among young artists.
The winner, Li Jhao-Ci’s “Succumbing to the Will of the Victor,” integrates, through grafting and assemblage, the suspended states of botanical pseudo-death and regrowth with ready-made deterrent objects such as anti-theft spikes. This forms a vocabulary of installation suspended between the organic and the inorganic. Within the space, it generates a fragile tension – each exhibition reveals a new state shaped by the plant’s continued transformation and its evolving, often compelled, form.
Lin I-Tsen’s “Echoes of Light” and “Beyond the Time” uses self-made charcoal pencils and paper pulp. Lin personally carbonized the charcoal, transforming plants into tools for depicting themselves, while the paper pulp was made from old documents and fibers from plants the artist had grown, embedding time and memory within its deconstruction and recomposition.
Chang Jui-Che’s “Bookmark all tabs” explores how humans perceive and store information from reality through two intertwined modes: compression and reproduction. The artist collects roadkill animals and preserves them as specimens. These flattened remains become imprints of natural life along the routes of civilization.
Chen Kuan-Lin’s “The Thickness of Paper” tries to build a connection between the history of expired analog films and an abandoned paper factory.
Chen Hsing-Yu’s “Trace-002” is derived from mottled and damaged traces found in everyday life, and constructs islands that do not exist in reality through the associative qualities of images.
Tseng Tzu-Chia’s “Ripple” is composed of multiple independent images, juxtaposed and assembled, attempting to evoke a latent interconnectedness that creates responses and attractions between the images, as if being reorganized by a larger context.
Huang Tzu-Yu’s “Metal Manifesto: Chapter III – The Materialized World” explores metal as a futuristic symbol of the digital age through a transdisciplinary dialogue spanning materiality, technology, and spirituality.
Lai Ka-Po’s “Sanctities” is a dual-screen video installation exploring religious experiences. The work centers on the Penrose triangle as its core motif – an impossible geometric figure that appears "valid" only from specific angles, metaphorically representing sacred experiences in faith.
Li Ning-Jyun’s “Animated bopomofo” explores the idea that tapping the keyboard without the intention of writing is like infusing “life” into the still, lifeless symbols.