In many ways it is simply an old-fashioned open-submission exhibition of the kind that regional museums and art centers around the country have staged for decades — except that it has gone digital.
When MAC International – the inaugural open-submission exhibition I had the honour of launching in 2014 – brought artists from around the globe to the heart of Belfast the art was sometimes bone-chillingly poignant, often illuminating, and, once in a while, just pure, mischievous fun.
"The first time I felt like a serious artist," Wallinger says, "was getting a work into the Whitechapel Open [the gallery's free submission exhibition for East End artists]." This would have been in 1982 or 3, when he cycled from London to Florence and was so moved by Botticelli's Primavera in the Uffizi that he made a work of art about it.
An exhibition of all three submissions — "Imagining the Future: Design Proposals for a New Museum in Vilnius" — will open on Thursday at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius.
The RA has trained some of Britain's finest artists and since 1769 its galleries have hosted the summer exhibition, the largest open submission exhibition in the world.
Ann Aptaker, the museum's curator of exhibitions, said the variety of submissions attests to the breadth of art education in the state's classrooms.
British artists from Sir Joshua Reynolds (the academy's first president) to David Hockney (master of the cool California pool) have presented their works at this event, held annually since 1769 and now billed as "the world's largest open-submission contemporary art exhibition".
Portraits and figures dominated his submissions to the Impressionist exhibitions and annual salons during the 1870s — possibly because they fared better with both critics and collectors.
It came to nothing, as also did the offer from the Royal Academy that submission to the Summer Exhibition might be a discreet route for the painting's safe return.
This piece is Ong's submission to festival and exhibition held at the Hin Bus Depot, a contemporary art center determined on inspiring a new generation of contemporary Malaysian artist.
And if submissions for the Hammond's exhibition are any guide, the number of South Asian artists is also increasing.
