Artist | Zhu Jia Awarded the 101st Guggenheim Fellowship (2026)
2026-04-21 15:22

New York, NY – April 14, 2026 – The Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation today announced the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows, including 223 distinguished individuals working across 55 disciplines, selected from nearly 5,000 applicants. ShanghART Gallery is honored to announce that artist Zhu Jia has been awarded a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Film-Video. He is the only Fellow with a mainland Chinese background in the film-video category this year.



The internationally renowned Fellowship was established in 1925 by U.S. Senator Simon Guggenheim and his wife Olga in memory of their son, John Simon. Its stated purpose is “to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since its founding a century ago, the Foundation has awarded nearly $450 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, spanning disciplines including mathematics, chemistry, geography, history, literature, film, music, and the visual arts. Among the Fellows are over 125 Nobel laureates, members of all national academies, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors.



The full list of 2026 Fellows will be published as a full-page announcement in The New York Times on April 19, and will also appear on the newspaper’s website. The annual awards ceremony will take place on the evening of June 1 at the Harvard Club of New York City.



*2026 Guggenheim Fellows full list: https://www.gf.org/stories/announcing-the-2026-guggenheim-fellows#2026-fellows



Born in Beijing in 1963, Zhu Jia graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1988. As one of the earliest pioneers of video art in China, his experimental works have provided bold examples for later generations of artists. His practice evolved in parallel with the wave of globalization in the 1990s, offering timely critical commentary on China’s social transformation. Zhu Jia consistently seeks to articulate his own artistic language within ordinary phenomena, actively presenting a world beyond habitual ways of seeing. His style is characterized by fixed camera positions, repetitive actions, non-narrative structures, and a detached observation of external reality, persistently challenging viewers’ perception of objective truth.



Zhu Jia has participated in numerous exhibitions marking significant historical moments, including: the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1997); the traveling exhibition Cities on the Move (1997–1999); Another Long March at Chassé Kazerne, Breda, the Netherlands (1997); the 11th Biennale of Sydney (1998); Extraction at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Italy (2000); Tempo at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2002); the 50th Venice Biennale (2003); the 10th International Istanbul Biennial (2007); the 7th Shanghai Biennale (2008); Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); M+ Sigg Collection: From Revolution to Globalisation (2021); and his solo exhibition We Are Perfect II at ShanghART Beijing (2024). His works are held in the collections of M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), and other institutions, foundations, and private collections.

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