11th international awards for art criticism

On June 7, 2025, the 11th International Awards for Art Criticism (IAAC 11) was officially launched at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, inviting submissions of art reviews in Chinese or English from around the globe. IAAC 11 is jointly organized by the IAAC Organizing Committee, the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, and the Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum, with support from the Royal College of Art in London and the Edinburgh College of Art.

At the launch ceremony, Lewis Biggs, curator and member of the IAAC Organizing Committee, stated: “Over the past decade of IAAC, we are delighted to receive reviews from more than 50 different countries. I should say that I use the word ‘review’ and ‘criticism’ to mean the same thing – anyone who writes a review of an art exhibition is involved in art criticism. the practice of criticism is the same whether it is reviewing art, exhibitions, poems, films, architecture, theatre or political manifestos – in fact, any cultural production. The practice of criticism is closely related to education, to intelligence and creativity and to all that is positive in human affairs. Today, much art writing is limited to praise and does not engage with questioning the art under review that it is useless. If art reviews were less bland, if they involved more thinking, they would have more effect. Like art itself – and the whole of cultural production – art criticism belongs to the symbolic world rather than to the first-order material world. We should not expect cultural production or cultural criticism to change the world directly. But culture and its criticism does change people. And then people change the material world. ’

Shen Yubing, Professor at the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, and Executive Dean of the Fudan University Art Research Institute, remarked: “The current art ecosystem faces dual crises: the dilution of local experiences under accelerated globalization and the decline of criticism in the age of social media. We hope art criticism can shoulder three responsibilities: serving as a critical anchor, a translator of locality, and an agent of thought. Art criticism is not merely a tool to interpret works but a way to understand the world. Amid the torrents of globalization and locality, we envision IAAC as a vessel to reclaim the courage of criticism and the power of judgment.”