AwardPuzzle for China National Exhibition of Fine Arts by Fan Xiang, Bobing Chen and Ying He

AwardPuzzle is an interactive data visualization online platform for award-winning tips of China National Exhibition of Fine Arts, and it is also a method to understand current ideology of China. AwardPuzzle maps 2276 awarded oil paintings onto diversified forms, allows the public to explore the preferences of the juries of China’s major national arts awards, and in doing so provides “tips” on how to win such awards and how to keep winning for more than thirty years.

A research report of AwardPuzzle (Version 1.0), which was issued in Chinese on Jan 14, 2014, had great impact on the Chinese Fine Art world and had caused a new round of discussions and became a hot topic through more than thirty thousand reposts on social media in the first seven days. Up to now, google search (keywords in Chinese: 全国美展+数据视觉化+向帆) shows 1500+ results of the reports of AwardPuzzle by major newspapers and websites.

In May 2016, AwardPuzzle online interactive platform was released to the public. We believe AwardPuzzle will attract more artists and critics to explore and discover the tips for success and more by themselves, and wish AwardPuzzle could contribute to the study of Chinese contemporary art.

A short video of AwardPuzzle can be found on youtube https://youtu.be/SRMMozxqbsU .