After New Wave Photography Award－Emerging Photographers in Taiwan

The New Wave Photography Award, first launched in 2024, was created to discover and support emerging talents in Taiwan. After three rounds of selection by a jury of domestic and international curators, 15 winning projects were chosen from 398 submissions. From the application process to the judging mechanism, the award was designed to embody openness, equality, and an international outlook. At its core lies the conviction that art should be democratized, not reduced to populism or confined to elitism. This vision rests on a firm belief that art springs from the freedom of human spirit and human mind, and that supporting photography in Taiwan is, in essence, enriching the spiritual and intellectual life of its people.

The 15 awardees explore diverse contemporary issues that extend far beyond the image itself. When gathered together in one exhibition, their works strike us with urgency, reminding us to reflect: in an age saturated with images, how can photography continue to carry meaning and push its depth further? 

As a new beginning, this exhibition seeks not only to move the winning works beyond the framework of competition and place them in a truly public space, but more importantly to use photography as a starting point for new dialogues. Each dialogue in turn becomes a force that deepens artistic practice again and again. In this way, the exhibition reveals that every artistic process carries within it the potential to create encounters and conversations between people. If democracy is about how we live together, then every act of art-making can be understood as a practice of democracy.