XIAMEN.- Kicked off in Xiamen on 25 November 2022, the 8th Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival announced that Malaysian artist Tan Chui Mui wins the Jimei x Arles Discovery Award 2022, and the Chinese curator Wang Shuman wins the Jimei x Arles Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image.

Tan Chui Mui (b.1978, Kinmen, Malaysia) with her exhibition Just Because You Pressed the Shutter? nominated by curator Wang Yiquan, wins the 8th Jimei x Arles Discovery Award this year.

"A photo captures a certain landscape. But the landscape is always there.
You didn’t make the camera. So why is the photo yours?
Is it because of your composition? Just because you pressed the shutter?"
— Tan Chui Mui

The curator Wang Yiquan mentioned: "In Just Because You Pressed the Shutter? a map is an image, a film is an image, and the sun, the air, the rain, the soil, potatoes and sorghum surrounded by a fence are all images. Hometown is also an image. However, Tan Chui Mui never pressed the shutter to obtain these images." 

An international jury has selected Tan Chui Mui as the winner of the Jimei x Arles Discovery Award 2022, the artist receives a cash prize of RMB 100,000. Excerpt from the jury report: "The Malaysian artist Tan Chui Mui draws on her own Chinese descent and family stories to explore the profound but undefined issues of land, inheritance, ownership, and photography. By creating a multi-dimensional experience, her exhibition showcases the confusion, pursuit and questioning of identity among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, she keeps a distance from such attachment to the motherland, and connects land ownership to photography copyright, discussing the two and expressing herself with openness and tenderness. For her, the search of roots is like opening a black box filled with unknown secrets. As a female artist, Tan Chui Mui provides a 360° perspective on the boundary of rights and possessions, revealing the hidden links between artworks and reality. The shutter is just a metaphor, unfolding our status of drifting back and forth between day-to-day life and the art world."




Tan Chui Mui is a Malaysian filmmaker and film producer based in Malaysia. She was born in Sungai Ular, a small fishing village in Kuantan, Malaysia. She graduated with a Bachelor of Multimedia (Hons) in Film and Animation in 2002 from Multimedia University, Malaysia.

Jimei x Arles Discovery Award was established in the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival's inaugural edition in 2015. Every year, the Award invites 5 curators to nominate 10 talented Chinese photographers as finalists to present solo exhibitions. The winner is selected by the jury committee during the opening week, who will then receive a 100,000 yuan prize (pre-tax) and an invitation to exhibit works at Les Rencontres d'Arles in France the following year.

The previous winners were: Wang Yimo (2021), Sim Chi Yin (2020), Yi Lan (2019), Lei Lei (2018), Feng Li (2017), Liu Silin (2016), and Zhu Lanqing (2015).

Wang Shuman (b.1993, Nanjing, China) with project The New Survivors wins 2022 Jimei x Arles Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image. As the winner, the artist will participate in a mentoring and exchange programme and receive a cash prize of RMB 100,000. The proposal of The New Survivors will be realised through the programme, resulting in an exhibition in 2023. 

Excerpt from the jury report: "The occurrence of trauma, both encountering and facing it, as well as accepting, processing and dealing with it, has always been a crucial issue faced by human beings. Wang Shuman's exhibition scheme, "The New Survivors," employs a relatively complete structure and rich presentation methods combining a variety of styles, including photography, moving images and video installations, to tackle the issue of the complexity of trauma as a human experience, and to encourage us to contemplate together how to face it, thus interpreting it as a common experience and joint heritage of all humanity. Her approach and choice of artists not only reveal a rich and diverse texture of all sorts of traumas and related memories, but also urge one to wonder how traumatic memories can be visualized. Our fundamental question is, how to, via artistic expression, enhance the visibility of trauma, no matter its cause, no matter whether it is physical or mental, nor whether human beings go through it as an individual or as a group, to explore its sources and mechanisms, the possibilities of healing, and thus surviving it. Wang Shuman's curatorial scheme can also be deemed as an answer."

Shuman Wang holds a master’s degree in art curating from the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Sydney, and currently lives and works in Shanghai. After joining OCAT Shanghai in 2017, she has served as the supervisor of the exhibition department since 2018. Wang has years of experience in organizing and coordinating exhibitions at OCAT Shanghai, which include Frontier: Refocusing on the Medium: “The Rise of East Asia Video Art” (2020), “I Hear Your Dreams: Contemporary Art from Norway” (2019), “Re-assessment of Post-Globalisational Politics” (2017). More recently, she turns her attention to the emerging media art practices, and curated OCAT x KADIST Emerging Media Artist Exhibition | “In Solidarity with____” & “UN/ CONVENTIONAL”(2022/20), “Payne Zhu: Match Pool”(2022), “Liao Fei: Is everything a contingent occurrence?” (2021), “Luka Yuanyuan Yang: Shanghai Low”(2020). In addition, she is a bilingual editor (Chinese-English) in OCAT Shanghai’s research team, responsible for the E-journal Amplifier, publications, and exhibition catalogues. Wang is also a curator and writer working in the field of media art. Her recent research interests revolve around the tension between the self and the multiplicity of power, and the proxy rules run during the exercise of power. She was the finalist in the Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech 2022. Her writing about contemporary art appears regularly in publications including Artforum, Art-Ba-Ba, ARTDBL, etc.