The City of Hiroshima has named North Carolina–based conceptual artist Mel Chin as the winner of the twelfth Hiroshima Art Prize. Established in 1989, the prize is presented by the city every three years in recognition of a contemporary artist whose work addresses humanitarian issues and contributes to global peace. Chin joins a cohort of recipients including Issey Miyake, Robert Rauschenberg, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Daniel Libeskind, Shirin Neshat, Cai Guo Qiang, Yoko Ono, Doris Salcedo, Mona Hatoum, and Alfredo Jaar. As part of the prize, he will receive a solo exhibition at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art.
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Hiroshima was the first of two Japanese cities on which the US dropped atomic bombs during World War II. Chin—who was born in Houston in 1951, six years after the bombing—in a statement referred to the devastation wrought by that campaign and to the ongoing destruction of the world’s ecological systems. “The significance of this honor cannot be overstated,” he said. “It comes as I live in an area ravaged by destruction in an era of human-induced climate change and as I continue to be a distant witness to the ongoing savagery of bombardments upon innocent and desperate civilian populations. As an American citizen my obligations force an undeniable complicity. The Hiroshima Art Prize strengthens a resolve to resist the support for this indefensible cruelty and protest such involvement. The prize obligates another commitment,” he concluded, “to foster complex ideas and relationships to be tools in the pursuit of ideals aligned with resistance to violence and the expansion of empathy.”
Chin through a diverse and uncategorizable practice encompassing sculpture, drawing, painting, video, animation, video games, and large-scale installations addresses environmental and social issues. Many of his projects are collaborative, and many have a scientific component. Exemplary of his oeuvre are Revival Field, 1990, pathbreaking at the time in its use of plants to remove heavy metals from soil, and the 2018 works Unmoored and Wake, placed in New York City’s Times Square and offering a visual preview of the effect that rising seas would have on the metropolis. Chin was selected as the prize winner for his efforts to bring about social change through alternative methods that include community engagement.
