Leo Gallery artist Wu Jiannan has recently been shortlisted for the 2026 Sovereign Asian Art Prize.
The Sovereign Asian Art Prize was established in 2003 with the aim of raising the international profile of artists from the region, while also raising funds for programmes that help disadvantaged children through expressive arts. Held annually, the prize is now recognised as the longest-running and most prestigious annual art award in Asia. The award operates on a curator- and gallery-nomination system, selecting 30 finalist artists from over 250 entries.
Feb. News treats the news as stagecraft. Housed in a genuine 1990s TV shell, a hyperreal anchor desk performs credibility while a fabricated backdrop pits Sun Wukong and Black Cat Detective against Tom & Jerry under incendiary headlines. A switch lets viewers tint the internal light, color-grading 'reality'.
Living and working between China and the United States, Wu has developed a firsthand understanding of the information environment. Complex real-world events, after being filtered through layers of retelling, often splinter into mutually incompatible versions, while the 'other' in the narrative is easily simplified or erased. This work makes that machinery visible: through exaggeration, distortion, omission, and carefully curated visibility, what the audience ultimately sees is often the result of meticulous stagecraft.
Feb. News questions the veneer of "neutrality": when complex reality is compressed into binary narratives, information becomes a megaphone for emotion and power. Dragging mythological figures and cartoon characters into the 'live political scene' is a blunt metaphor-we search for reality within a collage of fairy tales and propaganda, only to grasp at processed fragments.
This work offers no answers. It simply pushes three questions back to the viewer: What are you seeing? Why are you seeing it? Who made you see it? When you flip the light switch, you are also deciding which "truth" you are willing to believe.
