Experimental Sound Artist Ryoji Ikeda Wins 2026 Nam June Paik Prize

The winner of the ninth Nam June Paik Prize is Japanese visual artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda. The biannual award comes with a ₩50 million ($36,807) purse and a solo exhibition at the Nam June Paik Art Centre in Yongin, South Korea.

“I am deeply honored to receive the Nam June Paik Prize. I had the privilege of meeting Nam June Paik in his later years, and his work continues to resonate with the questions behind my own,” Ikeda said in a statement upon receiving the prize nomination.

Known for his explorations of sound, Ikeda began making music from digital audio glitches in the 1990s. His immersive 65-minute audiovisual performance superposition (2012), which took place at the Barbican Centre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, considers our understanding of the natural world through quantum mechanics.

In 2019, his large-scale digital projection and sound installation data-verse 1 premiered at the Venice Biennale. Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the piece turns open-source data from major scientific groups like NASA, CERN, and the Human Genome Project into a sensory experience.

Ikeda’s installations have been shown at arts institutions around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Park Avenue Armory, the Centre Pompidou, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and 180 Studios in London. Last year, he had shows at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the National Asian Culture Centre in Gwangju.

A committee and jury, including curators Cecilia Alemani, Naomi Beckwith, and John G. Hanhardt, were among those who chose Ikeda for the prize.

“Ikeda’s future vision and relentless probing into emerging technologies, including data visualization, algorithmic processing, and signal theory, precisely resonate with the forward-thinking exploration Paik valorised,” Ellen Pau, co-founder and artistic director of Videotage in Hong Kong and a member of the nomination committee, said. “Ikeda has made incomprehensible infrastructures sensorially legible and opened up civic discourse around information, surveillance and scale.”

Hanhardt, a longtime interlocutor of Paik’s and a former senior curator at New York’s Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, who also served as the jury chair, explained, “Like Nam June Paik, [Ikeda] is creating challenging and open opportunities to learn and experience hybrid aesthetic texts that become for the viewer an adventure, a contemplative space, and an opportunity to expand one’s horizons of experience and knowledge.”

Another jury member, Sabine Himmelsbach, director of the House of Electronic Arts in Basel, added that Ikeda “has fundamentally reshaped the aesthetic language of media art through the integration of sound, data, mathematics, computation, and immersive installations. His practice of translating scientific and computational systems into profound aesthetic experiences extends Paik’s experimental legacy into the age of data and algorithmic culture.”

The prize was established in 2009 and is funded by the Gyeonggi Provincial Government. It is awarded biannually to an artist whose experimentation and innovation have furthered contemporary art. Previous winners include Bruno Latour, Doug Aitken, Trevor Paglen, and Joan Jonas.

On September 8, Ikeda will be honored at a ceremony, followed by a conversation with curator Sam Ozer. An exhibition of work by Ikeda is slated to open at the Nam June Paik Art Centre in 2027.