Cathrin Pichler Prize Winner 2026: Sunggu Hong
The Cathrin Pichler Prize, endowed with €2,500 and sponsored by the City of Vienna, will be awarded to the artist Sunggu Hong in 2026. The prize recognizes artistic positions that contribute to academic discourse and open up new forms of knowledge production through specific methods and practices. The award ceremony will take place on July 3rd during the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna's graduation ceremony. Congratulations!
Hong is being honored for his work Uncanny Habitat, under the unmoving Moon. In it, the Vienna-based Korean artist opens up a poetic space for thought and experience, where bodies, machines, robots, movements, sounds, atmospheres, and affects are interwoven into a multifaceted synesthetic experience of coexistence.
From seemingly simple questions, Hong develops a fragile architecture of knowledge—a vibrant structure that doesn't explain, but rather makes tangible, revealing how relationships arise, how dependencies operate, and how forms of coexistence become possible. The jury explained its decision as follows:
“Especially in a present where art is often pushed towards quick readability, a clear message, or smooth communication, Hong’s strength lies in not reducing complexity, but rather making it tangible as an open-ended cartography: a fluid structure of relationships, ruptures, dependencies, and open questions, negotiated with a high degree of physical presence and dance-like skill. His work conceives of the relationship between the human and the non-human as a shared movement, as a reciprocal shaping, touching, and nurturing. In the sense of Cathrin Pichler, Hong combines artistic and scientific thought into an open space of knowledge, in which knowledge is generated through materiality, rhythm, perception, and shared experience. Thus, the performance becomes a site of temporary communion: an uncanny space of resonance in which bodies, machines, and affects not only encounter one another but mutually shape each other—and coexistence becomes tangible as a shared, urgent practice.”
Sunggu Hong, born in Seoul, lives and works in Vienna. He studied Fine Arts in South Korea and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he graduated in 2025 with a degree in Art and Time | Performance. The concept of relationship is central to his artistic practice. Starting with questions about the conditions of coexistence in interdependent, intertwined, and complex relationships, he explores forms of alienation, conflict, and connection. He is particularly interested in the relationship between human and non-human actors. By examining their mutual dependencies and entanglements, Hong questions anthropocentric perspectives and opens up new viewpoints on complex relational structures, events, and possibilities of coexistence.
Jury 2026
Verena Kaspar-Eisert (Heidi Horten Collection), Verena Gamper (Belvedere), Magdalena Stöger (Cathrin Pichler Archive), Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein, Carola Dertnig, and Stefanie Seibold (all Academy of Fine Arts Vienna).
About the Cathrin Pichler Prize
The Cathrin Pichler Prize has been awarded by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna since 2017 in memory of the thinker, curator, and author Cathrin Pichler. The prize, endowed with €2,500 and supported by the City of Vienna, recognizes students or graduates of the Academy whose artistic practice addresses scientific questions and understands them as an independent form of knowledge production.