2024 Asia Arts Game Changer Awards
Asia Society 
Thursday, May 16, 2024

6:00 PM | Champagne Reception 
6:30 PM | Conversation with Honorees 
7:30 PM | Seated Dinner

Dress Code | Cocktail Attire

This celebration is Asia Society’s biggest fundraiser for its Arts and Culture sector and for the Asia Society Museum’s exhibitions, and it is also a vital source of our programmatic funding. For more information, please contact Mariel Pezik Pajoow at [email protected]. 

This year we honor woman artists and designers, including Rina Banerjee, Minouk Lim, Maya Lin, Toshiko Mori, and Anicka Yi. 

Every year, at The Asia Arts Game Changer Awards, major art collectors, artists, gallerists, dignitaries from the art world, and Asia Society trustees and patrons gather to celebrate contemporary art in Asia and honor artists and arts professionals for their significant contributions to contemporary art.

For more than twenty years, Asia Society has been a pioneer in identifying and fostering the latest contemporary Asian artists, and engaging new audiences for their work.

Benefit Auction

Asia Society is thrilled to partner with Artsy on a benefit auction featuring artists Francesco Clemente, Vibha Galhotra, Jitish Kallat, Yayoi Kusama, Christian Marclay, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Sara VanDerBeek. Available exclusively on Artsy, now through May 21, 2024. 
Find out more and make your bid today! 

Make Your Bid

Honorees
 

Rina Banerjee 

New York City-based Rina Banerjee (b. 1963 in Kolkata, India) creates multi-faceted sculptures, paintings, and drawings, fusing boundaries often inspired by motives related to South Asia from global perspectives. Banerjee’s choice of material and subject matter question the experiences of femininity, climate change, migration, commerce, and identity in a globalized world. Her sculptures place in conversation cultural objects, textiles, domestic items, mythologies, and the material residue of colonialism. 
 
Banerjee has received considerable international recognition, including a recent traveling retrospective (Frist Art Museum in Nashville, San Jose Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts), a survey exhibition at Museé Guimet in Paris, and participation in the 55th and 57th Venice Biennales. She has also participated in important group exhibitions held at the Centre Pompidou, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.

Banerjee’s work is included in numerous public collections, including Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Jose Art Museum, California; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; Kiran Nadar Museum, New Delhi; New York Public Library; Queens Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Brooklyn Museum, New York; and University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. 

Minouk Lim

Minouk Lim (b. 1968 in Daejeon, South Korea) is a Seoul-based artist who extends the boundaries of different genres and media, including writing, music, video, installation, and performance. Lim’s work recalls historic losses, ruptures, and repressed traumas. Lim's work Is rooted in language, specifically the politics of expression of what has been said and what such expression has silenced in turn. Her sculptures, videos, performances, and installations do not replay past events; rather, they elevate the experiences, memories, and feelings of those sidelined by the political violence of the Korean War and its ensuing process of modernization.  

Lim’s solo exhibitions include Hyper Yellow (Komagome SOKO, 2024), Fossil of High Noon (Tina Kim Gallery, 2022), Night Shift, 2021 Title Match: Minouk Lim vs. Young-gyu Jang (two-person exhibition, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, 2021), and Minouk Lim: The Promise of If (PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, 2015). Lim has participated in a number of group exhibitions and biennials, including DMZ Exhibition: Checkpoint (2023), Real DMZ Project: Negotiating Borders (2021), Gwangju Biennial (2021 and 2014), Asia Society Triennial (2020), Setouchi Triennale (2016), Sydney and Taipei Biennial (2016), Paris Triennale (2012), Liverpool Biennial (2010), Political Populism (Kunsthalle Wien 2015), The Time of Others (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2015), and Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2009–2010).  

Lim’s work is included in numerous public collections, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Arts, Seoul; Gyeonggi Museum of Art, Ansan; Seoul Museum of Art; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Centre Pompidou, Paris; KADIST, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Modern, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. 

Maya Lin

 New York City-based Maya Lin, (b. 1959 in Athens, Ohio, USA) in her book Boundaries, writes, “I see myself existing between boundaries, a place where opposites meet; science and art, art and architecture, East and West. My work originates from a simple desire to make people aware of their surroundings.”

Maya Lin interprets the natural world through science, history, and culture, to create works that have a profound impact on how we view our history and how we relate to the natural world. From her very first work, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, she has gone on to a remarkable and highly acclaimed career in both art and architecture, while still being committed to memory works that focus on some of the critical historical issues of our time. A committed environmentalist, she is at work on her final memorial, What is Missing?, a cross-platform, global memorial to the planet, calling attention to the crisis surrounding biodiversity and habitat loss. An installation from this project is currently featured in Asia Society's COAL + ICE exhibition, on view through August 11, 2024.

Lin has been recognized around the world for her distinct aesthetic vision with groundbreaking site-specific art installations, such as the recent Madison Square Park installation, Ghost Forest; to award-winning architectural projects, such as the library for Smith College; the new performing arts lab space for Bard College; and the new design for the Museum of Chinese in America for downtown Manhattan. She is a member of the Bloomberg Foundation and the What is Missing? Foundation and a National Geographic Explorer-at-Large. In 2009, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts, and in 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 
 
Lin’s work is included in numerous public collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; and California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. 

Toshiko Mori

Toshiko Mori (b. 1951 in Kobe, Japan) is the founder and principal of Toshiko Mori Architect based in New York City. She is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and was Chair of the Department of Architecture from 2002 to 2008. Mori is a member the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Academy of Design. Toshiko Mori Architect has worked on a broad range of programs including urban, civic, institutional, cultural, residential, museum and exhibition design. Mori’s intelligent approach to ecologically sensitive siting strategies, historical context, and innovative use of materials reflects a creative integration of design and technology.

Awards include the Philip Hanson Hiss Award from the Sarasota Architecture Foundation in 2023, the Isamu Noguchi Award in 2021, the Louis Auchincloss Prize in 2020 from the Museum of the City of New York, the AIA/ASCA Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education in 2019, Architectural Record’s Women in Design Leader Award, and the Tau Sigma Delta National Honor Society Gold Medal in 2016. Her recent work, the Thread Artists’ Residency and Cultural Center and the Fass School and Teachers Residences’, both in Senegal, have recently won AIA Architecture Awards, and her master plans for the Brooklyn Public Library Central branch won the 2022 MASterworks award from the Municipal Art Society of New York. Architectural Digest has included Toshiko Mori Architect in its annual AD100 list since 2014. 

Anicka Yi

Anicka Yi (b. 1971 in Seoul, South Korea) is a New York City-based, Korean-American artist known for her focus on olfaction and her use of unorthodox, living, and perishable materials.

Informed by scientific research, biology, and perfumers, Yi has produced a unique body of work over the past decade at the intersection of politics and macrobiotics. Her practice questions the increasingly hazy taxonomic distinctions between what is human, animal, plant, and machine and is the result of an alchemical process of experimentation, which explores often incompatible materials. She collaborates with researchers to create media that are often inherently political and delves into the cultural conditioning of sense and perception in a way she describes as a "biopolitics of the senses." 

Yi's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel; Kunsthalle Basel; List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge; The Kitchen, New York; and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Group exhibition venues include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; New Museum, New York; Palais De Tokyo, Paris; the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel; and SculptureCenter, New York. Yi was awarded the 2020 Tate Turbine Hall Hyundai Commission, and the Hugo Boss Prize in 2016. 

Yi’s work is included in numerous public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Aïshti Foundation, Jal El Dib, Lebanon; Julia Stoscheck Collection, Düsseldorf; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.