Opening this January at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, the 6th VH AWARD Exhibition brings together five newly commissioned media artworks by artists working across Asia and its diasporas. Presented by Hyundai Motor Group’s VH AWARD in partnership with the National Arts Council Singapore, the show feels more like a collective thought experiment, as it asks how we live, remember, and care in an age shaped by machines, myths, and rapidly evolving technologies.

Now in its sixth edition, the VH AWARD has quietly become one of the most closely watched platforms for emerging media artists engaging with Asia’s cultural, technological, and philosophical contexts. Since its launch in 2016, it has championed works that blur boundaries between past and future, human and machine, reality and virtuality, and this year’s finalists continue that tradition with striking ambition.

Winning the Grand Prix award this year is Dream of Walnut Palaces by Beijing-born artist and technologist Wendi Yan, the Grand Prix recipient of the 6th VH AWARD. Rendered as a richly layered CGI film, the work reimagines knowledge exchange between China and Europe in the 18th century through the psyche of a fictional Daoist working inside a Parisian laboratory. Using game engines, AI, and archival imagery, Yan proposes an alternative to techno-Orientalism, one that imagines harmony rather than hierarchy between epistemic worlds.

Elsewhere, Lêna Bùi’s dream(machine, human) unfolds as a poetic, non-linear meditation on memory and mortality. Is it a machine dreaming of humans, or humans dissolving into machines? The ambiguity is intentional, leaving viewers suspended between myth and malfunction.

The artist collective HUDA x MUNGOMERY, formed in the Amazon rainforest, turns to mythology and ecology in Within Tirta. Drawing from the legend of Princess Mandalika and filmed using the rare Vistavision 35mm format, the work meditates on water, sacrifice, and ecological urgency. Its lush visuals carry an unsettling paradox: as nature fades, humans increasingly rely on digital awe to remember what is being lost.

Questions of identity and invisible labour surface in 40 Epochs by New York–based duo Tianyi Sun & Fiel Guhit. Inspired by their experience building and training an AI voice model, the semi-fictional short film probes spiritual displacement and the unseen work behind “human-like” technologies, particularly through the lens of Asian diasporic experience.

Rounding out the exhibition is War Dance by Seoul-born artist Inhwa Yeom, a visceral exploration of Asian women’s entanglement with love, care, production, and reproduction. Drawing from Korean mythology and the natural phenomena of sundogs and moondogs, Yeom’s AI-powered audiovisual work transforms myth into resistance, inviting viewers to question what is often taken for granted.

What ties these works together is not just their use of advanced technology, but their insistence on asking deeply human questions. As DooEun Choi, Art Director of Hyundai Motor Group, notes, the VH AWARD has evolved into “a distinctive platform for exploring transcultural and transhistorical perspectives in the ever-changing landscape of Asia.”

That spirit resonated strongly during the opening remarks by Low Eng Teong, CEO of the National Arts Council Singapore, who reflected on how art helps us navigate technological disruption. His words captured the exhibition’s ethos succinctly: “So much of our lives today is being disrupted by technology, and often we find ourselves waiting, waiting for something to happen, waiting to understand what comes next. With AI, there are moments when it feels like we cannot yet see clearly.

This is where art becomes so important. Through the work of artists and through their engagement with technology, we begin to better understand what art can be, what life can be, even as new technologies reshape our world. That is why collaborations like this matter so deeply.”

The Singapore presentation marks the exhibition’s fifth stop on a global tour that has already travelled through Basel, Yongin, Beijing, and Linz. It is also the second time VH AWARD works are being shown at Singapore Art Week, reinforcing the city’s role as a meeting point for global media art conversations.

For visitors, the exhibition offers more than visual spectacle. It invites slow looking, listening, and reflection, a chance to sit with uncertainty rather than rush past it. In a week filled with openings and overstimulation, the 6th VH AWARD Exhibition feels like a reminder that art does not always offer answers, but it can sharpen the questions we need to ask.

The 6th VH AWARD Exhibition runs from 20th to 31st January 2026 at Artspace @ Helutrans, Gallery 1.