In collaboration with the HUGO BOSS Headquarters and Christoph Noe as co-advisor, Larys Frogier conceived the Hugo Boss Asia Art and chaired its jury as a new prestigious award celebrating one emerging Asian contemporary artist every two years, a biannual group exhibition of six finalists Asian contemporary artists, as well as an on-going research platform gathering curators, theoreticians, art critics through seminars, symposia and publications.

Statement by Larys Frogier on the occasion of the first edition of Hugo Boss Asia Art in 2013:

Because we consider Asia as a construction and as a question to investigate rather than a monolithic identity to fix, Hugo Boss Asia Art is a multi-sites to activate and to analyze in relation to Asia's present on-going mutations, to its future development, and of course in articulation to its historical constructions. The creative, critical and educational practices of art in-between different regions in Asia constitute the fundamental conditions to the development of ideas, the circulation of artworks and people.

Economical, social and cultural growths in Asia are based on different models and diverse contexts which deserve to be analyzed, and so contemporary arts in Asia request constant re-mapping practices based on local and international challenges, as well as on past and future counter-cartographies that are very different from exclusive western perspectives.

Art creation and shared knowledge are fundamental to encourage cross-cultural exchanges between different regions in Asia.
In an era of globalization, we believe that interrelation between the commonplace and the singular should cultivate difference, diversity and contradiction as the foundations of our commonalities.

HUGO BOSS ASIA ART aims to activate and to question Asia as a site for new challenges addressed to international contemporary arts in an era of decisive global transformations and mutations. We believe that the ongoing progress of contemporary arts in Asia depends on our ability to cultivate continuous and porous dynamics with respect to otherness.

Hugo Boss Asia Art is designed to encourage artistic creativity and theoretical research as tools of critical analysis and inventiveness with regard to new ways of engaging in plural, local and international cross-cultural exchanges. This new project calls for a permanent commitment in favour of powerful experiments which can contribute to the practice of art and critical thought, notably by devising constructive attitudes with regard to new cultural challenges, as well as encouraging diversity in aesthetics, thought and culture.

Hugo Boss Asia Art is passionately involved in favour of movement, interchange and openness as the first conditions for the free circulation of ideas and works.

"The HUGO BOSS ASIA ART jury for the 2019 award for emerging Asian artists is extremely honored and proud to reward Eisa Jocson, artist from Philippines, Manila. As a female artist conceiving stunning and always unexpected art projects from performance to sound and visual installations, Eisa Jocson has a unique position in the contemporary art scenes in Asia and globally. The artist creates multilayered images, revisiting the vocabularies of dance and music, as well as infiltrating local popular references and contemporary visual art formats. It is with great intelligence that Eisa Jocson engages today’s life and art, always repositioning her own practice into the unknown, going beyond fixed identities, genders and frontiers.” Larys Frogier