The Japanese financial services group Nomura Holdings, Inc., has named artists Cheng Ran and Cameron Rowland as the winners of its inaugural $100,000 Nomura Emerging Artist Award. In March, the group also announced the establishment of a $1 million prize for contemporary art, the largest monetary award in the industry; its recipient will be announced in October.

“For the Nomura Emerging Artist Award, the jury has responded by selecting two artists of high purpose, exceptional intellectual ambition, and profound sensitivity to the fast-moving currents of today’s world,” said Kathy Halbreich, executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, on behalf of the jury. “We congratulate Cheng Ran and Cameron Rowland and look forward to the upcoming announcement of the winner of the Nomura Art Award.”

Cheng, based in Hangzhou, China, works with cinema, drama, Chinese literature, and installation to address spiritual conditions and disparities between cultures. His solo exhibition “Diary of a Madman” was staged at the New Museum in New York (2017), and his nine-hour film In the Course of the Miraculous (2015) was conceived during a residency at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.

New York–based Rowland critiques the legal and economic apparatuses undergirding and disciplining contemporary life. He has staged solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Établissement d’en Face, Brussels; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne; Fri Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg, Switzerland; Artists Space, New York; and Essex Street Gallery, New York. He will have a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 2020.

Alongside Halbreich, the 2019 prize’s jury comprises Allan Schwartzman, chairman of Sotheby’s fine arts division and principal of Art Agency, Partners; Doryun Chong, deputy director, curatorial, and chief curator at M+ in Hong Kong; Yuko Hasegawa, artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo; Max Hollein, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and Nicholas Serota, chair of Arts Council England. The late curator, critic, and author Okwui Enwezor also served on the jury.