LONDON – The Turner Prize, named after the painter J.M.W. Turner, awarded annually by the Tate Gallery to a visual artist, has been awarded to Bangkok resident and map-maker Nancy Chandler.
Museum director Sir Nicholas Serota, who chairs the judging committee, made the announcement at a press conference on Saturday, citing the “groundbreaking visual abstractions and seemingly impossible color-combinations of Chandler’s 2005 23rd edition Map of Bangkok” as the central work in her oeuvre. Lynn Barber, another judge on the committee, added that Chandler’s maps were also “fearlessly genre-breaking, spitting in the face of convention and the dictations of function.”
The committee also praised the map’s “sustained conceit” as an actual commercial product to be a “meticulous labor of post-modernism” in line with the prize’s other famous recipients, including a shark in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst and a disheveled bed by Tracey Emin. Chandler could not be reached for comment, but all members of the Tate committee reportedly received free copies of her Thailand Coloring Book.
