Hugo Boss Asia Art Award Bodies and Genders

Created in 2013 by the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award honours emerging Asian artists, especially those who are only at the beginning of their art practices. On November 6, for its fourth edition the jury – a mix of museum directors, curators and art critics – chose the Philippine dancer Eisa Jocson. The prize? 300,000 yuan… or 38,700 euros to be precise!

This year, the Taiwanese artist Hsu Che-Yu, the Chinese artist Hao Jingban and the Vietnamese artist Thao-Nguyên Phan all thought they might win. But it was the pretty 33-year-old brunette, straight from Manila in the Philippines who dethroned them, earning the award they had been waiting for: the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award. They will have the privilege of exhibiting alongside her until January 5, 2020, in a room at the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM). It’s no coincidence that Eisa Jocson was selected. First of all, she is unclassifiable: she comes from a classical ballet background but received training in the visual arts. She says she is a dancer and as much a choreographer as a performer. Her obsession? Bodies in movement and their representations in places where they are subjected to severe tests, from pole-dancing to the work of airplane cabin crew.

When she scrutinises bodies and skilfully represents them on stage, it is to question them, to work through questions of identity, gender, power relations, and the quests for the perfect body, the objects of unrestrained desire and consumption. In her work we have a little glimpse of the societal turmoil in the Philippines... perhaps some were even shocked by the choreography that she presented in Paris, “Machos dancers”, a tribute to men who indulge in erotic shows for other men; attired in waders and mini shorts, in her performance she re-appropriates the codes of male eros. At the award ceremony, Larys Frogier, the director of RAM preferred not to go into too much detail: “her work represents one of the most significant and successful contemporary visual creations, brilliantly combining media, such as performance, video and sound,” he admitted. A trans-genre artist giving the world of fashion a promising future!