The Queenstown artist won the $20,000 top prize at the Craigs Aspiring Art Prize exhibition, which opened last Friday and closed on Monday at the Holy Family Catholic School in Wanaka.
The piece, which includes an image of his wife Seulgi holding their son Nico on his second birthday, was the result of "quite a tricky process" in which a digital drawing was created on the computer from photographs he had taken, including those of his hand drawings and paintings.
This was then printed on to canvas and painted over in acrylic.
As a 9-year-old, he had enjoyed making "basic one-pixel line drawings" on his family’s first home computer.
Digital art was a passion that stayed with him as be became a professional artist and began running contemporary art gallery Broker.
"In recent years the digital side of it has come to the forefront, and that was especially reinforced after I went to Korea in August and went to the Frieze art show — the works I was responding to there were digital-analog hybrids."
It felt great to be chosen as the winner, he said.
He had a lot of respect for the judges, former head of the Dunedin School of Art Dr Bridie Lonie and curator Dr Louise Garrett, and felt they had selected a work that could have a divisive public response.
He was a firm believer in creating discussion about conceptual art.
"The more questions and ideas we can get going here, the better, and I’m very happy to be a part of that."
It also felt good to be chosen because there had been so many artworks spanning a range of genres in the exhibition, he said.
Co-organiser Sarah Jamieson said the event was going well, with more than double the entries received last year.
"This year there were 330, which has blown us away."
A selection process narrowed this down to 244 pieces included in the exhibition.
