supporting early career visual artists
Third Annual Liu Shiming Artist Grants Recipients
The 2025 cohort reflects global approaches to material, memory, and tradition within contemporary art practices
New York, NY — The Liu Shiming Art Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2025 Liu Shiming Artist Grants. Established to support visual artists within the first decade of their professional practice, the Artist Grants program enables the development of new work that critically engages with traditional, cultural, and historical frameworks through contemporary artistic approaches. Each year, up to five artists are selected to receive a $5,000 grant in support of research, production, and project realization.
Rooted in the values upheld by Liu Shiming (1926–2010) throughout his career as an artist and educator, the Artist Grants program reflects his enduring commitment to mentorship, craftsmanship, and the cultivation of thoughtful artistic inquiry. As a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Liu Shiming championed the importance of supporting artists at formative moments in their careers—a principle that continues to guide the Foundation’s mission today.
The 2025 cohort demonstrates a wide range of material practices and conceptual approaches, united by a shared attentiveness to lived experience, cultural memory, and the transformation of tradition across geographic and social contexts. From explorations of displacement and migration to investigations of ecological cycles, archival recovery, and embodied labor, this year’s grantees articulate distinct artistic positions that expand how history and identity are negotiated in the present.
The 2025 open call drew nearly 1,400 applications from artists representing over 90 countries, underscoring the program’s growing international reach and relevance. Following a multi-stage review process, the final recipients were selected for the rigor of their practices, clarity of vision, and the depth with which their work bridges past and present.
The Foundation congratulates new Liu Shiming Artist Grants recipients and looks forward to sharing updates on their projects over the coming months.
Manami Ishimura works with artificial materials to approach natural found objects as living entities, preserving their forms while emphasizing moments of transformation. Her practice focuses on states of transition, using fabricated substances to reflect processes of decay, preservation, and mutation found in nature. Through sculptural interventions, Ishimura investigates how materials shift between organic and synthetic conditions, foregrounding temporality and change rather than permanence. The grant will support the continued development of works that explore ecological cycles through constructed material systems.
Manami Ishimura
Rita Mawuena Benissan works with textile, installation, and archival research to investigate the displacement and recontextualization of Ghanaian historical materials. Her practice centers on archives that have been removed from their original contexts and relocated to Western institutions, treating them as fragmented and incomplete records. Through material reconstruction and reinterpretation, Benissan reclaims these archives as living sites of memory, addressing questions of cultural ownership, continuity, and historical repair.
Rita Mawuena Benissan
Blas Isasi’s work investigates the presence of cosmic and environmental forces that shape social, political, and cultural realities. Through sculptural and installation-based practices, he examines how systems beyond human control influence perception and collective experience. His work foregrounds natural phenomena as active agents, revealing their role within larger structures that govern collective experience. The grant will support further material exploration of these forces and their effects.
Blas Isasi
Shirin Towfiq is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines migration, belonging, and cultural memory through installation, textiles, photography, and video. Drawing from her experience as a second-generation Iranian refugee, she engages archival research and intergenerational narratives to address histories marked by loss and displacement. Her current project develops a large-scale textile and video installation incorporating recovered family photographs and home movies, using acts of translation and embodied reconstruction to reimagine inaccessible histories.
Shirin Towfiq
Sang woo Yoo’s practice engages ecological cycles and sensory experience through site-specific installations and material processes. Working with discarded organic matter, including Christmas trees, dust, resin, and plant-based materials, he creates works that address impermanence, loss, and renewal. His projects often incorporate participatory and ritual elements, inviting viewers to engage bodily with material transformation. Grant support will enable Yoo to further develop community-based works that return materials to ecological systems, emphasizing continuity between cultural rituals and natural processes.
