Art for Peace Competition 2022
Best Apisit Uthakhamkong organised the Art for Peace Competition 2022, a city-wide student arts event in Dunedin. Over 500 students from schools and universities across the city created work on the theme of World Peace. The awards ceremony was held at the University of Otago and brought together students, teachers, and the wider community.
What was the Art for Peace Competition 2022. It was a city-wide student art competition organised by Best Apisit Uthakhamkong and The Peace Club in Dunedin, open to students of all ages and disciplines, with a single brief: create a piece of work on the theme of World Peace, in any medium. It was the biggest single event The Peace Club had run to that point, and it grew out of a smaller Art for Peace competition held the previous year.
Planning began months ahead of the event. Uthakhamkong contacted schools and universities across Dunedin to invite students to take part, secured local businesses as prize sponsors, and worked with a team of Peace Club volunteers to draft the competition rules and set up a fair judging process. Because the brief was open to any medium, the organising team had to think carefully about how to judge paintings, drawings, sculptures, and mixed media pieces against one another on equal terms.
On the day itself, more than 500 students arrived with completed work. The range on display was striking. Some pieces addressed global conflict directly, others were quiet and personal reflections on what peace meant to the individual artist, and a good number sat somewhere in between. Judges described the standard as genuinely impressive, and the process of choosing winners across the different categories was not straightforward given how much strong work had come through.
The awards ceremony took place at the University of Otago, with Uthakhamkong hosting proceedings. Prizes were announced across multiple categories, and the room filled with students celebrating each other’s work rather than simply waiting for their own name to be called. Educators, sponsors, and members of the Dunedin public attended, and the event created a genuine conversation across the city about peace, about art, and about what young people are capable of producing when they are given a proper platform and a real audience.
Local business sponsorship played a meaningful part in making the event possible. Prize sponsors from across Dunedin backed different categories, which allowed the competition to offer awards substantial enough to make the effort worthwhile for entrants, while also connecting local commerce with a youth-led community initiative. That kind of cross-sector support has remained a consistent feature of how The Peace Club operates, drawing on council, university, and business relationships rather than relying on any single source of funding.
The scale of the 2022 competition marked a clear step up from the 2021 edition. Where the first Art for Peace competition had been a smaller, more contained event, the 2022 version reached across the city’s schools and both tertiary institutions, and the jump in numbers, from a modest first attempt to more than 500 entrants, reflected how much awareness of The Peace Club had grown in a single year.
For Uthakhamkong, the value of the competition went beyond the artwork itself. It gave hundreds of young Dunedin residents a reason to think seriously about peace, to put that thinking into a physical form, and to have that work seen and taken seriously by an audience of peers, teachers, and the wider public. He has described it as one of the projects he is proudest of, not only for what it did for The Peace Club, but for what it did for Dunedin as a community during a period when many people were still finding their footing after several disrupted years.
Community art competitions of this kind are rare at this scale outside the main centres, which is part of why the 2022 Art for Peace Competition drew attention beyond Dunedin’s own school and university networks. For a South Island city with a population under 140,000, gathering more than 500 student entries on a single theme, judged fairly and celebrated publicly, is a significant logistical and organisational achievement in its own right, separate from the quality of the artwork produced. It also set a benchmark that later Peace Club programmes, including the documentary series and the club’s eventual registration as a charitable trust, were able to build on.
The competition also gave Uthakhamkong direct experience in event logistics at a scale he had not managed before, coordinating entries across multiple schools, briefing volunteer judges, and running a public ceremony with a strict schedule and a large, excited crowd of students and families. That experience fed directly into how he approached later, larger projects, including the documentary interview series he produced the following year and the eventual registration of The Peace Club as a charitable trust, both of which required a similar level of coordination across multiple external parties and a similarly public final outcome.
Date
2022
Role
Organiser and President, The Peace Club
Organisation
The Peace Club (Trust), Dunedin.
Theme
World Peace
Website
thepeace.co.nz