MEET THE WINNERS OF THE 2026 PLAYGROUND PRIZE

Galerie VON&VON in Nuremberg has announced the winners of the 2026 Playground Art Prize, the only award run by a commercial gallery dedicated exclusively to art students: Sophie Constanze Polheim (1st Prize), Lin Htet Aung (2nd Prize) and Jiacheng Li (3rd Prize), selected from a record field of more than 200 applicants. All three show at the gallery's Playground Art Prize exhibition from 2 July to 28 August, with one going on to a solo booth at next year's Artissima.

Jiacheng Li and Sophie Constanze Polheim. Photography courtesy of gallery.

I've found that prize exhibitions tend to hang together by accident if they hang together at all. What distinguishes the winners of Playground Art Prize's trio, hosted by Galerie Von&Von and awarded to art students, and what became clear as Polheim and Li walked visitors through the show (Lin Htet Aung was sadly at a residency in Thailand), is how deliberately the three practices converge on a single problem: the archive as instrument. Each winner has identified a specific archival technology (the weaving pattern, the propaganda broadcast, the colonial photograph) and put it under cross-examination.

Installation photography courtesy of gallery.

Polheim's contribution begins with the oldest archive in the room: a microscopic photograph of a flax fibre, spun and twisted, dated to roughly 50,000 years ago. Evidence, she pointed out, that Neanderthals made their own clothing using techniques adjacent to weaving. Her interest is in the counterfactual this opens up. "How could our narratives of prehistory, and also about maybe women's work, change if textile materials were not perishable, but preserved within the archaeological record?" she asks, citing archaeologists who have proposed a "String Age" to sit alongside the stone one.

Installation photography courtesy of gallery.

Her response is a body of work that treats textile as information storage. The ceramic vessels of .wif derive from weaving information files, the digital descendant of the Jacquard punch card, translated with mathematician Dr Michael Ohme into 3D-printed forms; the steel plinths beneath them are drilled by hand with fragments of her own weaving patterns. "I drilled every hole, so it took a long time," she laughs. Negative space matters as much to her work as labour: "I'm very interested in techniques that work with absence, and absence is making the form. So the form is coming out of the nothing, actually."

The lineage she draws on is pointed. The Jacquard punch cards of the 1860s fed directly into early computing. "This connection of digital technology and weaving as a craft is already there," she said, "because it was developed by Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage." Her tapestry Flyology, woven at the TextielLab in Tilburg, layers a 1498 Nuremberg woodcut of a witch riding backwards on a goat, spindle in hand, against a photograph of core rope memory, the hand-woven computer storage used in early space missions. That weaving was done by women and the subsequent rope core technology was nicknamed LOL memory, for Little Old Lady. "These women had to be absolutely precise and very difficult in their skill to do this when it's going to space," Polheim notes, and yet "they were not taken seriously." Over both images run extracts from a letter an eleven-year-old Ada Lovelace wrote to her mother describing her plans for a flying machine, the project she called flyology.

Installation photography courtesy of gallery.

If Polheim works with what the archive failed to preserve, Jiacheng Li works with what it preserved all too well. The Singaporean painter, currently at Städelschule under Willem de Rooij, builds his canvases from colonial-era photographs and film of Southeast Asia, images produced to manufacture a version of the region for Western consumption. He traced the footage behind Bring 'em Back Alive to camera operators dispatched around the turn of the century to document the colonies as peaceful and prosperous: "They wanted to show people that these colonies were at peace, [that] they were all comfortable and they were all happy," he explains. Three decades later, that image-making matured into the 1932 film starring Frank Buck from which his painting takes its title, celebrating an adventurer who "saves" tigers in Singapore–by which point, Li noted, hunting tourism had already driven the animals towards extinction. His painting zooms out from an archival photograph of a couple posed behind a dead tiger and asks where the surrounding onlookers stood, "complicating who's looking at what."

Jianheng Li, On whose hill am I picking these fruits, 2025

The staging of the colonial image is his recurring subject. On whose hill am I picking these fruits reworks a photograph of a coffee plantation in colonial Singapore, a crop so unsuited to the land that elaborate irrigation had to be invented to sustain it. The labourers in the source image stand "somehow frozen in time," identified as workers but never as individuals. Li pushed the background towards monochrome and let colour flood the two foreground figures, wanting "to breathe more life into them," while remaining alert to the trap: "when you add colours to black and white photographs, it always seems to be a very endearing act of giving them of humanity."

Installation photography courtesy of gallery.

Where Polheim's relationship to the historical record is recuperative and Li's is forensic, Lin Htet Aung's is combative. The Burmese artist, who moved to Germany under urgent circumstances in December 2023, works directly with the propaganda apparatus of Myanmar's military state. Untitled | Metta Sutta strips the subtitles from a televised speech by the current dictator and replaces them with a Buddhist chant on loving-kindness, precisely synchronised to his cadence; A Metamorphosis deploys an AI-generated version of the dictator's voice reciting distorted lullabies over fragmented state-television footage. His stated method could serve as a statement for the whole exhibition: "I take their symbols and systems and transform them from within. It is like a form of witchcraft – an attempt to confront power using its own methods."

Jianheng Li, Poster Child, 2026

Witchcraft, in fact, keeps surfacing: in Lin Htet Aung's counter-propaganda, on Polheim's loom, in the 1498 woodcut of the spinning witch produced a few streets from where the exhibition now hangs. It surfaces again in Poster Child, where among the underrepresented Singapores that Li assembles across the canvas, a Pontianak, the vengeful female spirit of Malay folklore who preys on men at night, appears in one of the manicured outdoor zones where the city's expatriates gather. The figure is lifted from a well-known socialist painting held in the National Museum of Singapore's collection, so the haunting doubles as an art-historical one: a suppressed political tradition and a suppressed folk belief, both conjured back into the frame of the poster-city.

Installation photography courtesy of gallery.

All three artists have located the same historical pattern. Polheim's drilled steel answers Li's blurred plantation workers; both are studies in what a recording medium omits. Li's Gauguin-adjacent greens, chosen to capture how a tropical forest is remembered rather than how it looked, sit comfortably beside Lin Htet Aung's resynchronised subtitles; both examine the gap between an image and the thing it claims to show. The jury has picked three artists who arrived, independently, at the same scepticism about the reliability of any record. As Li notes: "the past can never really give you an answer to what's happening at the moment."

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The Playground Art Prize exhibition runs at Galerie VON&VON, Königstraße 5, Nuremberg, 2 July – 28 August. The jury comprised Angela Stief (Albertina Modern, Vienna), Dr Claudia Emmert (Kunstmuseum Bonn), Anna-Catharina Gebbers (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin), Benedikt Seerieder (Museum Brandhorst, Munich) and Dr Daniel Zamani (Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden).