Memory of Twin Towers Wins New Arts Prize

A handful of dust, gathered from the streets of New York in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, last night won the first £40,000 Artes Mundi prize for the Chinese artist Xu Bing.

Mr Xu, who was born in China in 1959, left the country after the Tiananmen Square massacre. He now lives and works in New York, and was in the city when the towers fell. He gathered the dust near the site, and used it to create a hauntingly evocative piece.

It came to Cardiff moulded into the form of a small white doll, as Mr Xu felt that an artist with a bag of white powder might attract the attention of customs officers.

He reduced it to dust again in a borrowed coffee grinder. He then blew it on to the Edwardian parquet floor of a gallery, stencilled into lines from an ancient Zen text: "As there is nothing from the first/Where does the dust collect itself?"

The organisers hope that the new prize, presented for the first time at the National Gallery of Wales in Cardiff last night, will come to rival the Turner Prize. The prize money is twice that of the Turner, and there is no age or residency requirement for entry.

The Artes Mundi exhibition continues at the Cardiff gallery until April 18.