Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026
Image: Willo Perron's design for Chanel’s S/S 2025 haute couture show. Courtesy of Chanel.
DESIGN
Willo Perron
Designer of the Year
Designer of the Year at the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 went to Willo Perron, designer behind some of the world’s most spectacular cultural moments. For more than 20 years, Perron Studios has been shaping the visual language of contemporary culture, capturing the creative zeitgeist through environments that sit at the intersection of music, fashion, art and performance. Built through collaboration, intuition and a belief in design as a cultural force, Perron’s practice reveals how space can frame how culture is seen, felt and remembered.
About the Wallpaper* Design Awards
Artes Mundi 11 Prize
Image: Antonio Paucar, exhibition view, Artes Mundi 11, National Museum Cardiff (2025–2026).
Photo: Robin Maggs.
ART
Antonio Paucar
Artes Mundi Prize
Peruvian artist Antonio Paucar was awarded the 11th annual Artes Mundi Prize at the National Museum Cardiff. Through his performances, sculptures and video works, Antonio Paucar creates an artistic language that reinvokes his origins in Andean culture through rituals and interventions. His practice addresses issues such as contemporary conflicts, the assassination of indigenous leaders, climate change and surveillance technology, and is characterised by establishing dialogues with Andean and indigenous ancestral knowledge, often in critical tension with Western culture, enriching his work with a multifaceted perspective.
Moving Image Commission 2025
Image: Saodat Ismailova, Melted into the Sun (2024), film still. © Saodat Ismailova/Fondazione In Between Art Film/Batalha Centro de Cinema Porto.
ART
Saodat Ismailova
Moving Image Commission
Saodat Ismailova received the Han Nefkens Foundation, Museo Reina Sofía, Singapore Art Museum and Walker Art Center Moving Image Commission 2025. Ismailova was recognized for her proposed new film exploring the layered dynamics between women's emancipation and ideology in the Soviet Era. She stated: "To receive the Han Nefkens Foundation commission is an opportunity to continue my long-researched project Nurkhon — a figure whose story was heavily manipulated by Soviet-era ideologies. My interest lies in narratives that have been reshaped by time — in the martyrs and erased figures whose presence flickers between myth and history."
About the Moving Image Commission
Maison&Objet 2026
Image: Installation view, Harry Nuriev, TRANSFORMISM, Maison&Objet 2026. © Anne-Emmanuelle Thion
DESIGN
Harry Nuriev
Designer of the Year
Harry Nuriev was named Designer of the Year Maison&Objet 2026. At the fair, the designer unveils TRANSFORMISM, an immersive installation conceived as a manifesto space. Here, objects are freed from labels. Past and future dissolve. Heritage, innovation and everyday forms are reframed through a single lens: perception. Harry Nuriev invites visitors to disengage from what is ‘old’ or ‘new’ and experience each object as something timeless, stripped of hierarchy and convention.
AR House 2025
Image: Atelier Tho.A, Lá-Sách House, Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam. © Anh Chuong
ARCHITECTURE
Lá-Sách House
AR House
Atelier Tho.A’s Lá-Sách House in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam has been announced as this year’s winner of the AR House awards. Characterised by their narrow facade and extreme depth, nhà ông or tube houses, are the dominant housing form in Vietnam’s urban areas – organic, bottom‑up formations which are a response to the pressure of urbanisation. Designed for Atelier Tho.A’s lead architects, Lá‑Sách House offers a surprisingly airy and open environment with its entire ground floor facade as a system of sliding and folding doors, opening onto a small garden. Though currently restricted to a close circle of friends, the space is intended to expand its role over time, cultivating friendships and connections with neighbours.
Bourse de soutien à la création contemporaine française caribéenne et amazonnienne 2026
Image: © Tania Arancia
ART
Tania Arancia
Bourse de soutien à la création contemporaine
française caribéenne et amazonnienne
The unRepresented by a ppr oc he salon, in partnership with La Station Culturelle (Martinique) and Rubis Mécénat, has awarded the second French Caribbean and Amazonian Contemporary Art Support Grant to Tania Arancia. Tania Arancia is an artist and textile designer born in Guadeloupe in 2002, where she returned in 2024 to pursue textile and poetic research at the intersection of the intimate and the political, as well as archiving her family memories. In line with this work on memory, she is also developing an experimental approach to photography, particularly around cyanotype and archiving.
About the Bourse de soutien à la création contemporaine française caribéenne et amazonnienne
Prix Polka du photographe de l’année 2025
Image: Homs, Syria, January 2025. The country's third largest city before the war was one of the major centers of the 2011 uprising. © Edouard Elias
PHOTOGRAPHY
Edouard Elias
Prix Polka du photographe de l’année
Edouard Elias is the winner of the Prix Polka du photographe de l’année 2025. Just one year ago, Bashar al-Assad's regime fell. Immediately, numerous reporters traveled to Syria to cover this historic event. Among them was Edouard Elias, who knows the country well. He visited for the first time in 2012 and didn't hesitate to return, as he felt he had a date with history: not only in general, but also with his personal history. Edouard Elias was held hostage by the Islamic State for 10 and a half months between 2013 and 2014. "What happened there had a profound effect on me because, beyond my own story of detention, which is really just a detail, it was a whole martyred nation that might finally be able to breathe again."
About the Prix Polka du photographe de l’année
Jimei × Arles Discovery Award 2025
Image: Hu Weiyi, Erosion - Yulong Snow Mountain No.8, 2021.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Hu Weiyi
Jimei × Arles Discovery Award
Artist Hu Weiyi, presented by X Contemporary Art, received the 2025 Jimei × Arles Discovery Award for his project The Inner Obscura. Hu Weiyi immerses his film — capturing mountains, rivers, and natural landscapes — into his own gastric acid, allowing this digestive fluid to modify the images unpredictably. Through this act, the relationship between humans and nature is introduced into an entirely new dimension. Susan Sontag points out in Regarding the Pain of Others that the camera lens often establishes a safe distance between the photographer and the subject. On the contrary, Hu Weiyi's process erases the boundary between the interior of the human body and the external natural world, transforming the latter from an object of observation into a subject ‘metabolized’ by the body.
About the Jimei × Arles Discovery Award
Les Nuits Photo 2025
Image: Ivan Poutnik, Le Moulin Rouge. © Anteo Caselli
PHOTOGRAPHY
Ivan Poutnik
Grand Prix LNP
Les Nuits Photo, the festival dedicated to photographic film, awarded its Grand Prix LNP to photographer Ivan Poutnik for his film entitled Le Moulin Rouge. Paul and Stefan are two 14-year-old friends. Not particularly interested in school, they hang out together in 1980s Paris and fantasize about adult life. They have one idea in mind: to break into the Moulin Rouge. So before Stefan moves away, Paul struggles to find a way to get into this legendary and inaccessible place.
