Jiajia Zhang is the recipient of the Shizuko Yoshikawa Art Award, which comes with a prize of CHF 25,000. The awardee received her MFA in 2020 from the Zurich University of the Arts. The Shizuko Yoshikawa Art Award has been awarded biannually since 2018 to support young women artists at the beginning of their artistic careers.

Jury Statement
The jury recognizes Zhang’s originality in exploring media-based imagery and distribution channels of our day. Among the things she looks for in her work are the differences and transitions between lived space, housing, and realty. Overlaying her recordings with found text fragments from various literary and popular sources, including advertising slogans, she is able to mediate between the culturally disparate spheres of cities in Asia and Europe. Zhang’s reflection on an everyday life increasingly informed by self-optimization and adding value convinced the jury.

Award-winner
Jiajia Zhang works with video and photography, presenting them in installations. She rearranges her visual materials—some found, some self-produced—in a very precise process and relates them to one another in unexpected ways. Social phenomena and mass products meet trivialities such as private YouTube videos or Instagram posts. In her work, the artist creates a dynamic borderline area that oscillates between the personal and the generic and challenges our entrenched definitions and concepts of the private and the public. Jiajia Zhang’s work amounts to a visual stocktaking of reality, while at the same time confronting us with the speculative element involved in their reception.

Jiajia Zhang lives and works in Zurich. She studied architecture at ETH Zurich (2001–2007) and the International Center of Photography in New York (2007–2008). In 2020 she received her MFA from the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Her works have been included in various exhibitions, including Swiss Art Awards (2022), Werkstipendium Zürich (2022), Friart Friboug (2022), Coalmine Gallery (2021), Kunsthaus Glarus (2021), Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard Paris (2021), Haus Wien (2020), Kunsthalle Zürich (2020), and Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2019).

Jury
Martin Beck, artist, Vienna and NYC (guest expert)
Melanie Ohnemus, Director, Kunsthaus Glarus (guest expert)
Elisabeth Grossmann (member of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees)
Sibylle Loyrette (member of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees)
Gabrielle Schaad (member of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees, head of the jury)