Welcome to the Social Art Award 2025 – Online Gallery!
🌊 Dear friends of art and transformation, 🌊
A heartfelt thank you to all artists and creatives who submitted their powerful works for this year’s Social Art Award under the theme: “Planetary Healing – Blue Tribes for Ocean Health.” Your inspiring visions speak to ocean restoration, biodiversity, and reimagining our coexistence with all life forms on Earth.
After receiving 922 submissions from across all continents, and concluding a very active public voting phase, the Social Art Award now enters its next chapter:
🔹 What’s next?
The professional jury panel is currently reviewing and selecting the TOP 100 entries that will be featured in the official Social Art Award 2025 book. In parallel, the two public voting winners will move forward as wildcards into the final jury round.
🔹 Coming up:
-
Shortlisted artists (TOP 10) will be announced by mid-June.
-
Winners of the Social Art Award 2025 will be revealed at our Online Award Ceremony on July 2, 2025.
We invite you to stay connected as we celebrate the power of Social Art to drive dialogue, awareness, and collective transformation.
Let’s continue to amplify art as a force for Planetary Healing.
Dialogue(s) Before Sunset
shannonxiao@temporaryshow.com
Dialogue(s) Before Sunset is a three-screen video art capturing the sunset interplay of day and night, self and other, and the past and future narratives of the Taniwha. Taniwha are Māori water spirits and kaitiakitanga (spirit gardian) along Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington Harbour's water space. It honors the creature who guards the modern harbour—areas that were once swamps and streams—remembering its post-colonial presence. On my journey from streets of China to shorelines of Aotearoa/New Zealand, I busked with Chinese filmmaker Lu, until one day I heard a whisper from the waters underneath the city. We responded with sounds, embodying spiritual messages through birch bark pieces from northern China. Encountering Māori artist Tanya enriched the journey with her everyday captures of the Taniwha Ngake and Whātaitai, sunlight, clouds, and giant stingrays. Around the shoreline, stories were shared in gardens with Māori healer Paula, setting wishes with poetry and native plants around a bonfire during Māori New Year’s eve. In this digital space of art, multiple narratives, images, sounds, and places of encounters are presented, alongside my ongoing dialogues with other women, the land, and the water. Different energies coexist in the space, in dialogue with others. We believe that the Taniwha is present, and guiding us towards a future where the divine connections with land and water, inherent between cultures, can be seen, heard, felt, and remembered.
Dialogue(s) Before Sunset is a three-screen video art capturing the sunset interplay of day and night, self and other, and the past and future narratives of the Taniwha. Taniwha are Māori water spirits and kaitiakitanga (spirit gardian) along Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington Harbour's water space. It honors the creature who guards the modern harbour—areas that were once swamps and streams—remembering its post-colonial presence. On my journey from streets of China to shorelines of Aotearoa/New Zealand, I busked with Chinese filmmaker Lu, until one day I heard a whisper from the waters underneath the city. We responded with sounds, embodying spiritual messages through birch bark pieces from northern China. Encountering Māori artist Tanya enriched the journey with her everyday captures of the Taniwha Ngake and Whātaitai, sunlight, clouds, and giant stingrays. Around the shoreline, stories were shared in gardens with Māori healer Paula, setting wishes with poetry and native plants around a bonfire during Māori New Year’s eve. In this digital space of art, multiple narratives, images, sounds, and places of encounters are presented, alongside my ongoing dialogues with other women, the land, and the water. Different energies coexist in the space, in dialogue with others. We believe that the Taniwha is present, and guiding us towards a future where the divine connections with land and water, inherent between cultures, can be seen, heard, felt, and remembered.