2025 Finalists

In Between Survival and Surrender, two boxers are locked in combat, one frozen midstrike in what could be the decisive blow. The figures are nearly identical, prompting the viewer to ask: are they two opponents, or two halves of the same self?

This ambiguity becomes the work’s central tension, rendering it at once a depiction of sport and an allegory of the battles we carry within.

My own reflections are drawn to the confrontation between strength and fragility, survival and surrender. Yet the piece reaches beyond autobiography to suggest that conflict is not incidental but structural – a framework of life itself. Duality is a pillar of humanity, an endless clash of opposing forces, whether cosmic, ideological, or personal. Our world, after all, is shaped by collisions.

Art history gives us language for this dynamic: the Apollonian and the Dionysian, order and chaos, reason and instinct. In Between Survival and Surrender, the boxing ring becomes a stage for this perpetual contest, a site where standoff and impact generate something new. It is also an arena of spectacle, in the Debordian sense, where conflict is commodified, consumed, and replayed until we too are implicated as both spectators and participants.

Rather than allow us the distance of observation, the work calls us closer. It asks: do we side with the striker or with the struck? Where do we locate ourselves in the rhythm of our own conflicts – at their dawn, their breaking point, or the brink of resolution?

Perhaps, as Nietzsche reminds us in The Birth of Tragedy, life becomes bearable – and even beautiful – through this dance of opposition.

The question lingers: are we content to watch the tragedy unfold, or are we willing to step into the ring and inhabit it?

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