In the current artistic and cultural environment with limited resources and an uncertain future, how should young photographic creators navigate their path forward? What should they do to go a long way? This talk invites Yi-Cheng Sun, the curator of the exhibition After the Award: New Wave Photography Award, and five emerging photographic creators who were recipients of the award, Xhin Toh, Deng Pu, Yi-Ling Jong, Che-Hsi Kuo, and Tzu-Yun Lien, to discuss how creators navigate the impact of awards and exhibitions in reality while finding their own artistic paths.
The talk is both an exchange of experiences in photographic creation and an honest conversation between local creators about their future paths. From the artistic environment, award, and publishing to the exhibition, the five emerging creators will share their observations and reflections from their artistic journeys. They will also discuss how collaborating with the curator led them to rethink the relationships among their works, the space, and the viewers.
Besides the talk, the New Wave Photography Award 2024: The Key Set will be available for purchase on-site, which includes the fifteen winning series from the first New Wave Photography Award. We warmly invite you to join us and experience the distinct charms of print reading and the exhibition space.
▌Speakers
｜Xhin Toh
Xhin Toh is from Johor, Malaysia, and is currently based in Taipei. He graduated from the Department of Radio, Television and Film at Shih Hsin University. He formerly worked as a photojournalist at CommonWealth Magazine. During his time in Taiwan, he began exploring photography—pursuing beauty while also using the medium as a way to heal and understand his inner self. Having encountered photography for nearly a decade, the turning of fate has brought new connections between his life and the photography. In this post-photographic era, he hopes to carve out a timeline of photography that truly belongs to him.
｜Tzu-Yun Lien
Tzu-Yun Lien was born in Taipei and now lives in Kinmen. He graduated from the Department of Political Science, Political Theory Division, National Taiwan University. Currently, he serves as an assistant at the Kinmen County Councilor’s service office while being a co-founder of Whoyo Travel Agency. Lien currently focuses on post-war photography in Kinmen through his creation, involving photos of military relics and the local residents’ memories about the war. He is also collecting the salon-style portraits of the conscripted soldiers from Taiwan taken at the front line of Kinmen in an attempt to map out the memories of the Cold War era through vernacular photography.
｜Che-Hsi Kuo
Che-Hsi Kuo was born in Taipei and now lives in Taipei. He graduated from the Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University. He now works as a silicon engineer at Google Taiwan. He explores the relationships between histories, spaces, and landscapes in his works. Occurrences of historical events always bring changes to spaces and landscapes, especially in Taiwan, a place with complicated historical context. He hopes to propose his viewpoints and findings about Taiwan, expecting to stimulate viewers’ different understandings and imaginations of Taiwan when seeing the scenes they have been familiar with.
｜Deng Pu
Deng Pu was born in Taipei and now lives in Taipei. He obtained his MA from the Department of Sociology, Tunghai University, and was a PhD candidate at the Department of History, Sun Yat-Sen University in China. Deng frequently visited Hong Kong while staying in Guangzhou, observing every corner of the city with both intimacy and detachment. He transitioned from academic research to a full-time career in photography. Drawing from life experiences and cultural history, Deng focuses on the intersection of history and society. He often uses traditional black-and-white film to capture human beings’ emotions and feelings through abstract and metaphorical images.
｜Yi-Ling Jong
Yi-Ling Jong was born in Kaohsiung and now lives in Kaohsiung. She graduated from the Department of Fine Arts Master Program, Tainan University of Technology. Now she works as a freelance art creator. In the beginning, her creation interests lie in the exploration of self-desire and later turn to female and social issues. Most of the time, her visual creation is to showcase and package reality with fantastic elements and images.
▌Moderator
｜Yi-Cheng Sun
Yi-Cheng Sun graduated from National Taiwan University with a degree in Life Science and earned a Master of Fine Arts in Transdisciplinary Art from Taipei National University of the Arts. She views curating as a means of producing alternative knowledge, and thus continues to collaborate with different fields through exhibitions. Since 2016, she has co-organized the young curators’ community “Self-Educating on Curating” for a long time, hoping to build an exchange platform that converges on contemporary curating. In 2023, she became a lecturer at National Tsing Hua University’s College of Arts and began her Ph.D. research the following year.