HERALBONY Art Prize 2025

Born in Gifu in 1958, Hibino Katsuhiko began his artistic career in the early 1980s while studying at Tokyo University of the Arts. He garnered major attention for pushing the boundaries of expression by integrating art and media platforms in our society. Since then, Hibino has engaged in a wide range of interdisciplinary activities, both in Japan and abroad, participating in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the Sydney and Venice Biennales. He has also continued to organize workshops and art projects that utilize the unique characteristics of local spaces. Hibino currently serves as the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, and the Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto. In addition, he has been involved in educational and research activities at his alma mater, Tokyo University of the Arts, since 1995, and became the school’s president in 2022. In this role, he established the Geijutsu Mirai Kenkyujou (the research field for art of the future), where he continues to explore the possibilities of contemporary art by collaborating with corporations and local governments, and pursuing the idea of “art inspiring a zest for life” through research and practice.

After graduating from Boston University (Massachusetts, U.S.A.), she worked at Art Tower Mito (Ibaraki, Japan) and Sogetsu Museum of Art (Tokyo, Japan) before joining the office for the opening of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa in 2003. She engaged in the field of planning and installation of architecture and commission work. Since the museum's opening in 2004, she has organized numerous exhibitions. The exhibition features contemporary artists and their works who are active both domestically and internationally, such as Olafur Eliasson, Do Ho Suh, Fiona Tan, and Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. She has been involved in planning and selecting museum collections, building school partnerships, and creating educational outreach programs for visitors of all ages. She also became the general curator at City Net Asia (Seoul, Korea) in 2011, at OpenArt (Örebro, Sweden) in 2017, and at Culture City of East Asia (Kanazawa, Japan) in 2018.

©Yuna Yagi

Klaus Mecherlein is an art historian, exhibition curator, author and university lecturer. He is the inaugurator of EUWARD, the European art award and its international archive. Following his studies in art history, art education and psychology at the University of Munich, he founded and headed the Atelier Augustinum in 1992, a studio community for outsider artists in Munich, and since 2004 became the curator of several exhibitions at Museum Haus der Kunst, Munich. In 2001, he became director of the German Art assistant program (Eucrea) and since 2011 he has been a part-time lecturer at Munich University of Applied Sciences. For ten years, from 2009 to 2019, he has been the chairman of Eucrea Germany E.V. He is the author and co-author of various publications on Outsider Art as well as contemporary art.

©Christian Topp, München

Harriet is the Director of Art Partnerships at Creativity Explored in San Francisco, California. She received a BFA from California College of Arts & Crafts in 2001 and an MFA from Yale University in 2006. Prior to joining Creativity Explored, Harriet worked on the editorial staff of Artforum Magazine for over 50 print issues. Previously, she was a fine art fabricator and from her time working in this world, she created and hosts Craftsmanship Podcast, an oral history project that documents the fabrication community. She’s dedicated her time to arts nonprofits, higher education and for the last few years she has been the co-owner of Heroes Gallery, a curatorial project born in New York’sLower East Side that pairs artists with their historical influences.Harriet currently works with and advocates for the artists of Creativity Explored to help fulfill their goals and place their artworks into the contemporary art conversation.