Eugene Jung, Gozié Ojini, and Umico Niwa named to 2025 short list
United States
Foundwork is delighted to announce that New York-based interdisciplinary artist Antonia Kuo has been awarded the 2025 Foundwork Artist Prize. Now in its seventh year, the prize grants Kuo an unrestricted 10,000 USD and studio visits with each of our five 2025 jurors. In addition, Eugene Jung, Gozié Ojini, and Umico Niwa were named to the Short List; and, for the first time, each Short Listed artist will also receive an unrestricted 1,000 USD microgrant to support their practices.
The jury for the 2025 Foundwork Artist Prize includes highly acclaimed and visionary voices hailing from New York, Los Angeles, Boston, London, and Paris.
Ebony Haynes, Senior Director, David Zwirner and 52 Walker, New York / Carmen Hermo, Curator of Contemporary Art, MFA Boston, Boston / Lauren Mackler, Independent Curator, Writer, and Designer, Los Angeles / Antonia Marsh, Curator and Founder, Soft Opening, London / Hugo Vitrani, Curator, Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
“A first inattentive glance might suggest that Antonia Kuo’s pieces have nothing to do with photography—or, conversely, that her pieces contain nothing pictorial. By stretching languages and the very boundaries of practices and plastics alike, Kuo reveals luminous materialities, impressions drawn from both classical and modern processes, from photo-chemistry to machine inks. In relief, in space, sometimes as assemblage/sample/cut up, her work places our senses within troubled, troubling imaginaries—somewhere in the opacity of the negative and the positive,” says Hugo Vitrani.
“Antonia’s work impressed us for its experimental use of materials and process, bringing together different technologies and mediums to create sculptural images and installations that feel at once visually abstract and elemental, industrial and ethereal,” says Lauren Mackler.
The Foundwork Artist Prize reflects the Los Angeles-based platform’s larger purpose to create visibility and engagement for emerging and mid-career artists, and to enable discourse and access between artists, curators, and collaborators globally. In 2024, our awardee was Satpreet Kahlon; in 2023, Valerie Asiimwe Amani; and in 2022, Dominique White.
About Antonia Kuo
Antonia Kuo received an MFA from Yale University, her BFA from School of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University, and a one-year certificate from the School of the International Center of Photography. Her work has been exhibited at Chapter NY, James Cohan, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Project Native Informant, London; Adams and Ollman, Portland; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Each Modern, Taipei; and the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines, among others. Kuo has been an artist-in-residence at Mass MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, The Banff Centre, and was a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, the Frye Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara, Indonesia. She lives and works in New York City, New York.
About Eugene Jung
Eugene Jung is an artist based in New York and Seoul who builds post-apocalyptic environments that respond to contemporary catastrophes through sculpture and installation. At times, cartoonish worldviews are added to the landscape of ruins to construct an alternative reality. In doing so, she contemplates how the media and popular culture consume and sense disasters as images. The artist’s use of pseudo-real materials suggests a complex relationship between reality and artwork. Her work has been shown at the Busan Biennale in Busan; Thaddaeus Ropac, Museumhead, Art Sonje Center Art Hall, Arko Art Center, DOOSAN Gallery, and AVP Lab in Seoul; and the Hessel Museum of Art in New York. She was also named to the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list.
About Gozié Ojini
Gozié Ojini was born in Los Angeles and lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. He holds an MFA from Yale University’s Sculpture Program, a BA from the School of Art and Architecture at UCLA, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, ME. He was recently included in “Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2025). He has had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York (2024) and In Lieu, Los Angeles (2023), and has been included in various group exhibitions, among them “Stitious” at Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (2025), “After Hours” at the Kiang Malingue, New York (2025), and “Polyphonic Views” at Funkhaus, Berlin (2025), among others.
About Umico Niwa
Umico Niwa explores the constraints and possibilities of personhood through installation, drawing, and sculptures. The resulting works speak to a deep, palpable longing for transcendence—a desire for self-actualization not confined by conventional identity markers. Niwa lives between the US and Japan, and a major installation is currently on view at the Sculpture Center, New York and will travel to Museo Tamayo, Mexico City in 2026. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as: The Asia Society, Houston; Public Gallery, London; Towada Art Center, Japan; Someday, New York; Simon Subal, New York; Kristina Kite, Los Angeles, and Miriam, New York. She was a resident at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts (2023–25) and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, Nebraska (2022). Her work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at ILY2 in Portland, Oregon in spring 2026.
About Foundwork
Foundwork is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization supporting access and recognition for contemporary artists worldwide. We provide a focused digital platform for emerging and mid-career artists to introduce their work to curators, gallerists, and other collaborators across the global art community. We also host ongoing programs to encourage interest and engagement for participating artists. Artists working in any media are welcome to register and participate.
For press inquiries, please contact mail@foundwork.art.
