Shanghai focus for major UK art contest
- Source: Global Times
- [09:19 August 19 2010]
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Tian Zi Mountain (left) by Zhang Wei's and Peach Blossom Epigraph by Zhang Zhenxue, two of the prize-winning works at the John Moores Prize in Shanghai. Photos: Courtesy of Shanghai Gallery of Art
By Nick Muzyczka
A highly respected art competition from the UK is currently enjoy-ing its Shanghai debut in the Shanghai Gallery of Art. The John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize, which has never before left the city of Liv-erpool, attracted 1,135 entries from all over China.
Last weekend the five win-ners of this inaugural prize were announced at the gallery. Their works are now on show alongside 23 other valuable entries and a handful of prize-winning pieces from the 2008 Liverpool competition.
The John Moores Prize is held every two years and is an important part of the Liverpool Biennale. Its founder, Sir John Moores, a leading entrepre-neur in the city and founder of the gambling and retail company Littlewoods, created the competition in 1957 in an attempt to challenge London's monopoly over the cultural scene in Britain at the time. It has become a leading art competition in the UK, attract-ing around 3,000 entries every two years.
"In Britain, over the last 50 years, almost every successful painter has cut their teeth in the John Moores Prize, and many painters, as a matter of course, will submit some-thing every two years. It's like a repeating rite of passage," explained James Moores, great-nephew of the competi-tion's founder.
"John Moores was an ama-teur painter who kept entering works into competitions, but was never very successful, something he partly attributed to his notoriety as a business-man," Moores added.
John Moores wanted to cre-ate a competition that would remove prejudice and worked to counteract nepotism. In contrast with many other art competitions, the prize will accept submissions from anyone, regardless of whether they are a professional painter or not, and all submissions are treated with anonymity.
