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Find out who was selected for the 2020 edition of the Sunny Art Prize. 49 artists (instead of 30) working with a range of media, were selected for this year’s opportunity.
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The Sunny Art Prize has established itself as one of the UK’s most prestigious international art competitions. The scope of this contemporary art prize is about sourcing the most talented artists from all over the world, both established and emerging ones, who produce ground-breaking and innovative artworks. We select artists who work with a wide range of media, making the art prize a varied and stimulating global platform to engage with critical contemporary issues and topics. The art competition is open to everyone, regardless of location or preferred medium and theme.
Every year, we shortlist 30 artists, among whom we select three winners. All the shortlisted artists have the opportunity to exhibit their work at the Sunny Art Centre, London.
We would like to thank everyone who applied for the Sunny Art Prize 2022, we have received an overwhelming number of applications this year. The quality and diversity of the artwork submitted and the passion shown by the artists fill our hearts with warmth and desire to organise the Sunny Art Prize 2022.
The Sunny Art Prize has established itself as one of the UK’s most prestigious international art competitions. The scope of this contemporary art prize is about sourcing the most talented artists from all over the world, both established and emerging ones, who produce ground-breaking and innovative artworks. We select artists who work with a wide range of media, making the art prize a varied and stimulating global platform to engage with critical contemporary issues and topics. The art competition is then open to everyone, regardless of location or preferred medium and theme.
Every year, we shortlist 30 artists, among whom we select three winners. All the shortlisted artists have the opportunity to exhibit their work at the Sunny Art Centre, London, a prestigious art institution with an extraordinary collection of old masters and artworks by leading contemporary artists. In addition, the winners, alongside seven other artists chosen from the shortlist, have the chance to exhibit their work with our partnering galleries in China. The exhibiting galleries are located in cities across China, such as Beijing and Shanghai, and are amongst the leading art institutions in the Asian art market.
This art contest also gives the art prize-winners the chance to experience a one-month
artist residency in China. The Artist Residency Programme is organised in collaboration with established Chinese art institutions, and it provides the opportunity to engage with historically and culturally rich places in China.
We would like to thank everyone who applied for the Sunny Art Prize 2021, we have received a great number of applications from all over the world. The quality and diversity of the artwork submitted and the passion shown by the artists, fill our hearts with warmth and desire to organise the Sunny Art Prize 2022.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: We apologise for the significant delay in the shortlisting process this year due to a few numbers of applications being incomplete or not processed properly, so we have been emailing these artists separately and processing these applications manually. We aim to have the shortlisted artists announced by the 28th of Aug. We thank you for your understanding.
The announcement date for the 30 shortlisted artists for SAP 2022 has been postponed to the 28th Aug 2022 (23:59 BST)
The Sunny Art Prize has established itself as one of the UK’s most prestigious international art competitions. The scope of this contemporary art prize is about sourcing the most talented artists from all over the world, both established and emerging, who produce ground-breaking and innovative artworks. We select artists who work with a wide range of media, making the art prize a varied and stimulating global platform to engage with critical contemporary issues and topics. The art competition is open to everyone, regardless of location or preferred medium and theme.
Every year, we shortlist 30 artists, among whom we select three winners. All the shortlisted artists have the opportunity to exhibit their work at the Sunny Art Centre, London, a prestigious art institution with an extraordinary collection of old masters and artworks by leading contemporary artists. The winners, alongside seven other artists chosen from the shortlist, have the chance to exhibit their work with our partnering galleries in China. The exhibiting galleries are located in cities across China, such as Beijing and Shanghai. They are amongst the leading art institutions in the Asian art market.
This art contest also gives the art prize-winners the chance to experience a one-month artist residency in China (pending in 2022 due to Covid-19 restriction in China). The Artist Residency Programme is organised in collaboration with established Chinese art institutions, and it provides the opportunity to engage with historically and culturally rich places in China.
Don’t miss the opportunity to experience exhibiting in multiple international exhibitions and participating in a residency in China, visit our “Apply Now” page and submit your application today.
Exhibit your work globally in prestigious galleries from London to Shanghai.
Win from a cash fund of £6,000 to expand your practice.
Win the First Prize and get an exclusive 1-month solo exhibition in the heart of London at the Sunny Art Gallery.
Participate in a residency in Asia, and engage with historically and culturally rich destinations in China.
Reach audiences worldwide by showcasing your work online to over 100,000 visitors.
Be included in the finely printed catalogue released internationally for each edition of the Prize.
Submissions are accepted from every country in the world and are all equally judged. Please note that you must be at least 18 years old to enter the competition.
You are the Artist or creator of the Work(s), or You are expressly authorised as a gallery, agent or other representative to submit the Work(s) on behalf of the Artist or are expressly authorised by the estate of a deceased Artist to do so. If you are so authorised, You agree to be bound by these Terms and assume the liabilities set out in these Terms.
All visual artists from around the world are invited to submit their best artworks on the theme for inclusion in the exhibition.
All types of art styles may be submitted, including both 2D and 3D works, painting, sculpture, digital, printmaking, fiber, photography, graphic, mixed media, as well as experimental and installation works.
We celebrate creativity in all its forms – across multiple media including Painting and Drawing; Video, Installation and Performance; Photography, Digital Art & Installation; Artists’ Film and more.
We accept works on any theme from artists at all stages of their careers.
All 2D work such as painting, drawing, and projected videos (including moving images and installation) must be 120x120cm in size max.
All three-dimensional work, including sculptures, ceramics, and mixed media artworks, must be 80x80x80cm max in size. Installation art (whether made of mixed media or digital) must be assembled on-site at the exhibiting location and can reach 100x100x100cm max.
The entry fee is non-refundable. If you choose to enter only one work, it won't be possible to add a second work at a later date.
You must pay your fee and submit your digital entry, including images of your artworks, by 23:59 (BST) on 30th July 2022 at the latest. We will not accept any late submissions.
The first round of selection is made from digital images of artworks, from which the judges will shortlist up to 4,000 entries to be delivered to the Academy for the final round.
If you are successful in the first, digital round, we will notify you by email and ask you to deliver your artwork to the Royal Academy for the next round of selection.
You can also check the progress of your submission using your Summer Exhibition account whenever you like.
Step 1: Click below to login or register
Step 2: Complete the submission form
Step 3: Complete payment and press ‘submit’
Create your account
Submitted in 2021? You should already have a Summer Exhibition account. Login to your account, or request a new password if you’ve forgotten.
First time entrant? Register now and we’ll send you a link to your new account.
Pay your entry fee
You can enter one or two works, for a fee of £38 per work, which covers our administration costs. You can pay this online by credit or debit card. Please note that the number entries is capped at 16,500, so please purchase yours soon in order to avoid disappointment.
Enter the details and upload images of your artwork
The Sunny Art Prize was established with the aim of providing artists and communities with an international platform to exchange, express, and share culture. Additionally, it provides audiences with a space to engage with different media. It is also meant to be a collective experience, where audiences from all over the world join a selection of international artists in a democratic conversation about contemporary art and creative experiences.
The artists shortlisted from the previous London show and that will be part of this group exhibition in China are Stephen Doyle, Stefano Zaratin, David Antonio Loureiro, Stephanie Kilgast, Wei Tan, Shinyoung Park, Anca Stefanescu, Kishwar Kiani, J. Jie Li, Jeongkeun Lee, Mi-Young Choi, and Juheon Cho.
The selection of artists from all over the globe will provide audiences in the East to further re-elaborate the themes explored during the London exhibition. The variety of practices, from drawing and painting to mixed media, sculpture, photography, and installation will allow for wider engagements towards issues relating to contemporary socio-economic contexts. Religion, immigration, borders, gender and sexuality, identity, and climate change are just a few of the critical topics these international artists wish for visitors to confront. Therefore, the scope of the exhibition, trough travelling artworks and ideas, is to let audiences from different global contexts respond in culturally unique ways to problems and issues that affect us all on a universal level.
The Sunny Art Prize was also established with the intent to help artists reach new markets that can support their practices in the long term. Access to one of the strongest art markets in the world in China can help artists unlocking new possibilities, and reach collectors otherwise unavailable through conventional exhibitions. The sustained exchange between the East and West through sound cultural projects, such as exhibitions and residencies, devised in partnership with Chinese art institutions, is at the foundation of what the Sunny Art prize stands for.
Daniel Jackont is a London-based photographer and film director born in 1993.
His career began after finishing his Film and TV studies when Daniel became fascinated by people’s backgrounds, lives, characters, and personal experiences
His approach to photography is driven by documenting the unique stories that reveal themselves from the subjects, the ability to frame and capture life moments of people, in a somewhat surreal manner by using light, set, and color which is an important ingredient in Daniel’s work
This point of view inspires and leads the narrative look and feel of his projects.
Daniel’s work ranges from extravagant fashion to classic portraits and romantic storytelling through positioning a character in a specific situation. Began his creative process by developing a message and writing a short script, with a more profound approach of a comprehensive process from idea to a full concept completion creating while researching, testing all elements, and building the concept and the images.
Creating a naive and youthful mood, the viewer can be immersed in a new reality, continually holding a promise of an adventure - a scene from a movie one always craved to be a part of.
By engaging and understanding his subjects, Daniel is creating a closeness that allows them to act naturally and by that shows a more subtle side of them.
The ability to mix between the genres of Surrealism and documentary and create scenes and compositions based on his subject's true experiences and thoughts is the most intriguing aspect of photography for Daniel.
Medium: Oil and pigments on 640gsm cotton rag paper
Size (cm): 70x100cm
Year: 2021
Elly Cho has exhibited around the world and holds numerous awards. Her art explores the intersection between nature, the environment and human behaviour, across various mediums including mixed media, video and performance art.
She approachs the subject matter of cultural landscapes in narrative form, and these narratives often relate to her own life experiences and memories. In her video work, She has used familiar landscapes that stimulate viewers to engage with an imaginative response.
Her recent research about color, nature and mental health brought new body of work that explores the relationship between ecology and human existence. By drawing on colors and movement of nature, aesthetic of being, and poetry in nature. She trys to mimic the movement of the species and then expanding the drawing to a more imaginary scene of poeticism. She feels that nature is a place where everyone feels to be part of and even if we are all apart from each other, being in nature, makes us together and connected. Through her work, She seek to instill in the viewer a highly charged but nostalgic awareness of things long since past. She aim to experiment further, encouraging political engagement that allows both artwork and environment to jointly contribute to current artistic discourse.
Cho’s awards include “Times Square Midnight Moment” in New York, Excellence Award in Poetry Writing from Excellence Award in Poetry Writing from Samteo Literary organization in Korea, Myers Community Art Project Award from Columbia University in New York, and a residency with the 3-D Sculpture Park artist residency program in Switzerland, AHL Foundation Residency in New York.
Cho’s approach to art making, is largely inspired by the relationship between nature,
environment and the viewer’s perception to nature based on their personal history.
Her works are featured in major collections such as Seoul Municipal Museum and Musée Cantonale des Beaux-Arts du Valais in Switzerland, and in exhibitions such as ‘Nature’s Tempo’ at the Korean cultural services of New York, and ‘Going Green’ in conjunction with Queens Art Express in New York. Passionate about performance art, projects include ‘Sounds of Fragment: Ecological Dreams’ at the Nam June Park Art Center and Seoul Innovation Park.
Currently participating in a fellowship program at BeFantastic Together, techart for climate change, Cho holds a BA and MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in London and an MA in Art Education from Columbia University. After obtaining her MFA, she taught visual art courses as well as theory at universities in Korea.
Medium: Oil and pigments on 640gsm cotton rag paper
Size (cm): 70x100cm
Year: 2021
Space of Transition discusses the effect climate change and in particular global warming is having on the natural world. It is specifically about the most northern USA State, Alaska, a place I visited in 2019 where I discovered a new world of such vast beauty. A troubling landscape, experiencing temperatures higher than before in the month of May, a place that is constantly shifting. I hope to expose the underlying consequences our actions have on the natural world.
Space of Transition is considered, immediate, compelling and highly relevant, as it was subsequently created during lockdown. An intense period of making for me, tapping into the material realities of the Covid-19 pandemic. A conversation began between an immersion of memories and observational drawings made on location transporting me back to the quiet space of Alaska and capturing what I was feeling emotionally at the moment of making here, in my studio. Drawing on both personal and universal narratives.
I made Space of Transition during a period of deep anxiety, my world suddenly turned upside down, a situation I found myself in forced upon by the pandemic. My painting is about the transitioning from a situation of feeling isolated from everything familiar to the progressive reopening up of our lives again in 2021. Space of Transition is really about isolation and survival reflecting on how quickly the actions of human beings can affect both our personal lives and the natural world.
Painting is emotionally draining but so rewarding, so much of myself are in my works. Painting helped me understand and make visible what I was experiencing, a crossover of two unquantifiable experiences in my life, helping me through the extreme emotions I was feeling at the time. Space of Transition is part of a large body of work completed over the last two years.
We would like to thank everyone who applied for the Sunny Art Prize 2021, we have received a great number of applications from all over the world. The quality and diversity of the artwork submitted and the passion shown by the artists, fill our hearts with warmth and desire to organise the Sunny Art Prize 2022.
Closing the 2019 edition of the Sunny Art Prize is the prizewinner solo exhibition, Golden Age by British artist Christopher Cook. Cook will be exhibiting his latest series of monochrome paintings that use the Dutch still-life tradition as visual and conceptual backdrop to explore the consequences of colonialism, and the birth of contemporary capitalism. The show will be on view at the Sunny Art Centre (30 Gray’s Inn Rd, WC1X 8HR, London) from August 14th – September 12th 2020.
Christopher Cook is a contemporary visual artist who has worked in monochrome for the last 20 years, specifically using a fluid medium that combines graphite powder with resin and oil. He appreciates Odilon Redon’s position that ‘One must respect black, nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye, and it awakens no sensuality. It is the agent of the mind far more than the most beautiful colour of the palette or prism’. Monochrome has also opened up for his connections to early black and white photography, as well as gestural ink painting of the Eastern traditions.
The exhibited graphite images are made on coated paper and produced with a performance-like process in which multiple ‘rehearsals’ are wiped away until Cook is ready to make the final image, usually over an intensive few days. His preoccupation with 17th-century Dutch still-life painting began with straightforward transpositions of iconic works, which developed into a sustained imaginative inquiry. The Dutch genre is renowned for its sumptuous beauty, but it was also intended as a display of wealth and power, reflecting the colonialist expansionism of that epoch, and this combination came to reflect for Cook a ‘coming of age’ of capitalism and materialism. This recognition prompted him to evoke contemporary implications of the genre, disrupting the beauty of the various tableaux through the addition of anachronistic elements, often militaristic, to suggest modern-day exploitation, conflict, and protectionism. Cook has stated however that he wishes to maintain a balance between his reverence for the original works and this iconoclastic tendency.
The art historian Jeanne Nuechterlein, in describing his work, remarks: ‘What Cook’s images do, is focus more squarely on the moral problems involved in the desire to accumulate and then protect wealth, problems he views as intertwined with the structures of capitalism - the urge to exclude or destroy any perceived threat to prosperity leads to defensiveness, social conflict, even military intervention. Thus are opened up new conversations with the traditions of Dutch still life painting.’
Christopher Cook’s work has received wide critical acclaim and has been collected by institutions worldwide including the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam Cambridge, Cleveland Museum of Art, USA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Paintings from this series were included as a contemporary intervention in the recent historical survey exhibition at York Art Gallery ‘Making a Masterpiece: Bouts and Beyond 1450-2020’.
Format: Hardback
Dimensions: 21x21cm
£35.00 £19.00 (ex. VAT)
The Sunny Art Prize provides a unique opportunity for pioneering artists of the 21st century to raise awareness on current world affairs through our printed publication. The exhibition catalogue immortalises work of creative talent from all over the world. Each shortlisted artist and their work are rigorously selected by a panel of world-leading art historians, art museums, and gallery professionals to provide the public with the finest artists the world has to offer. All catalogues of the Prize are also collected by prestigious libraries such as at Oxford University, UAL and the Slade School of Art for new generations of artists to study.
The diversity of the shortlisted artists guarantees innovation and fresh approaches to contemporary art practices from 3D work, ceramics, and installations to paintings, sculpture, and video art. This catalogue is an excellent opportunity to explore some of the most thought-provoking issues of contemporary life ranging from COVID-19, climate change and mental health to social movements such as Black Lives Matter and Trans Lives Matter.
Format: Hardback
Dimensions: 21x21cm
£35.00 £19.00 (ex. VAT)
The Sunny Art Prize provides a unique opportunity for pioneering artists of the 21st century to raise awareness of current world affairs through our printed publication. The exhibition catalogue immortalises works of creative talent from all over the world. Each shortlisted artist and their work are rigorously selected by a panel of world-leading art historians, art museums, and gallery professionals to provide the public with the finest artists the world has to offer. All catalogues of the Prize are also collected by prestigious libraries such as Oxford University, UAL and the Slade School of Art for new generations of artists to study.
The diversity of the shortlisted artists guarantees innovation and fresh approaches to contemporary art practices from 3D work, ceramics, and installations to paintings, sculpture, and video art. This catalogue is an excellent opportunity to explore some of the most thought-provoking issues of contemporary life ranging from COVID-19, climate change and mental health to social movements such as Black Lives Matter and Trans Lives Matter.
Format: Linen hardback cover ( gold embossing)
Dimensions: 21x21cm, 104 pages
Contains photographs of all shortlisted artworks as well as a profile statement for each artist which includes the conceptual framework of their practice and of the artworks exhibited during the second edition of the Prize.
Explore the work of a group of international artists aiming to raise awareness of themes encompassing climate change, the current international debate regarding immigration and refugees, our perception of identity (both our own and the identity of the society we live in), the spectacle of news media communications, sexuality, gender, race, and queer culture, among others.
£24.00 £14.00 (ex. VAT)
Sunny Art Centre, 30 Gray's Inn Rd, London, WC1X 8HR
0044 (0)2086165990
artprize@sunnyartcentre.com
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