A Singaporean Bookbinder just Made Loewe's Most Prestigious Shortlist

The Loewe Foundation Craft Prize made its Southeast Asian debut this year, staging its finalists' exhibition at the National Gallery Singapore from 13 May to 14 June and among the 30 finalists selected from more than 5,100 submissions across 133 countries and regions sat a single Singaporean name: bookbinder Adelene Koh.

Koh is only the second Singaporean ever shortlisted for the prize since its 2016 founding, following papercut artist Ashley Yeo in 2018. Her entry, titled Endless, reimagines one of bookbinding's most overlooked structural details - the endband, the small reinforcing stitch at the head and tail of a book's spine - as a large-scale sculptural object: a compact ring of paper, wire and thread built around a slender aluminium core using an English sewing technique dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries. "Bookbinding is a practice that is not always widely understood," Koh said of the recognition. "In that sense, this recognition is an affirmation, both in my own work and the practice of bookbinding."

A LASALLE College of the Arts graduate with a master's in cultural relic conservation from Taiwan's Tainan National University of the Arts, Koh trained as a fine bookbinder in both London and Tokyo before winning her first international prize in 2017. This year's jury, chaired by Sheila Loewe and including Naoto Fukasawa of Japan's Folk Crafts Museum and the Louvre's Olivier Gabet, marked the first time Loewe's own creative directors, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, sat as jurors themselves.

Singapore hosting the exhibition for the first time carries its own significance beyond Koh's individual nomination - a signal that the region's craft practices, not just its retail spending power, are increasingly being treated as worth a global luxury house's attention.