SINGAPORE, Sept. 14, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — On the afternoon of August 17, 2025, the “Witnessing the Present” International Youth Photography Competition Award Ceremony was held on the prestigious Inter Art Center/Gallery positioned within the landmark 798 Art District in Beijing. Jointly organized by the Singapore Good Soil Foundation and Inter Art Center/Gallery, the competitors invited center college to school college students aged 15 to 22 from around the globe to seize via pictures, their views on modern life, their desires for the long run, and their reflections on youth and progress.
Event Highlights
The occasion was co-hosted by Project Initiators Ms. Faye Lo and Mr. Na Risong. At the opening, Mr. Na, Artistic Director and Curator of Inter Art Center/Gallery, defined the intention behind launching the competitors and emphasised the significance of offering a platform for younger pictures lovers globally. Subsequently, Project Initiator Ms Faye Lo, Founder of Singapore Good Soil Foundation, and Project Co-Initiator Mr. Zack Cao additionally took the stage to ship their speeches, sharing their hopes for younger individuals to specific themselves via pictures and the Foundation’s dedication to selling the event of the humanities for teenagers.
Project Co-initiator Mr. Zack Cao spoke about how pictures may very well be used a bridge between people.
The occasion introduced collectively main figures from the worlds of pictures and tradition, together with famend photographers Zhu Xianmin, Wang Wenlan, He Yanguang, Xie Hailong, Ren Shulin, Guo Jianshe, Shang Junyi, Hei Ming, Zhang Xulong, Liu Li, Jia Yong, and Zhang Chunyu; Media skilled Yang Lang; Professors Zhu Jiong and Jiating from the Beijing Film Academy School of Image Media and Communication; Deputy Editor-in-Chief of China Photography Journal Chai Xuan; Editor-in-Chief of ImageChina Net Cao Xu; Editorial Director of Popular Photography Li Xin; Editor-in-Chief of Photo Friend Liu Dong; China Photography editor Chen Qiushi; outstanding blogger Luo Dawei; younger photographer and Inter Art Center New Documentaries Prize winner Yang Wenbin; and Witnessing the Present award recipients Huang Anni, Qu Shizhe, and Cao Xuan. In addition, Liu Wenkui, Executive Vice Chairman and Secretary-General of China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, Zhang Boju, Head of the Ginkgo Foundation, Wang Dong, Director of Beijing Stars and Rain Education Institute for Autism, Zheng Yanjun, Partner of KIP Capital and Ren Tao, CEO of Beijing Zhide Lingcheng Cultural Development Co. Ltd additionally attended the press convention.
Global Participation Since its launch, the competitors has attracted widespread consideration and enthusiastic participation from younger individuals throughout China, India, Malaysia, Singapore, France, the United States, and past. Contestants ranged in age from 15 to 22, with the youngest participant simply 15 years previous.
The judging panel consisted of judges from all around the globe, comprising of Mr. Edmund Clark (Renowned British video artist and Postgraduate Tutor of Journalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London (UAL) ), Mr. James Ramer (A Famous American Photographer, Curator and Professor at Parsons School of Design primarily based in New York and Founding Director of the MFA Photography Program), Mr. JY (Jiang Yi) (Renowned Japanese Artist, Doctor of Physics and Representative of the Tokyo School of Painting), Ms. Faye Lo (Founder of the Singapore Good Soil Foundation) and Mr. Na Risong (Artistic Director and Curator of the Inter Art Center/Gallery).
Award Winners After ultimate deliberation by the 5 judges, the highest three awards went to:
First Prize: Traces of Light by Chen Beiting (Guilin University of Technology)
Second Prize: Where the Light Ends by Chen Yumeng (Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts)
Third Prize (tie): Butterfly Prison by Huang Anni (Beijing City University) and Winter Veins by Li Yuxiang (Guangxi Arts University)
Selected Award-Winning Works The following showcase chosen items from the successful works. For the total showcase of successful works, please click on here
Chen Beiting – Traces of Light (First Prize)
Since shifting to Guilin for college, I’ve solely been capable of return house as soon as each six months. As I get older, reminiscences of the previous regularly resurface in my thoughts, however they arrive again in fragments. Certain scenes that when moved me proceed to stir one thing inside me. The distance of a thousand miles has made me replicate extra deeply on the which means of house and household in my life.
My photographic sequence Traces of Light makes use of reminiscence as its vessel. I revisit locations that when held these reminiscences, in search of traces of time, layering remembered fragments over present-day scenes. In my recollections, these magical objects usually glow, like little time machines guiding us towards the present of time’s circulation, carrying us again to the hometowns of our reminiscence.
Light Hopscotch
Chen Yumeng – Where the Light Ends (Second Prize)
My visible pocket book stitches collectively the folds of life via fractured views, bringing again on a regular basis fragments, weathered by time, into focus. Within these small, wayward phases, the dysfunction of objects and the poetics of residing merge in a dance of entanglement. As existence itself turns into the creating fluid, every fleeting second expands within the darkroom, branching into nebula-like roots of narrative.
Salt Patterns of the Earth (2)
Huang Anni – Butterfly Prison (Third Prize) [Tie]
I’m an individual with delicate feelings and powerful empathy, but additionally vigorous and cheerful by nature. Growing up immersed in Lingnan tradition, nonetheless, my life has been formed by the fixed pull between custom and modernity. In Guangdong’s clan-based tradition—just like the sprawling roots of a towering tree—custom permeates day by day life: ladies’s names are hardly ever recorded in ancestral tablets, my mom busied herself within the kitchen throughout festivals whereas males carried out the rituals, and conversations about granddaughters inevitably circled again to marriage. Though my family is comparatively egalitarian, I nonetheless really feel the load of those unstated guidelines throughout every vacation gathering. Many of my feminine associates proceed to be formed by such norms, usually missing self-confidence, or creating a people-pleasing disposition. Through my pictures, I hope to encourage and encourage them to interrupt free from these constraints, to construct confidence, and to dwell past the boundaries imposed by custom.
The inventive course of itself has additionally been a journey of self-growth. In shaping feminine figures inside my work, I sought to convey a core thought: womanhood will not be merely a gender, however a situation. It is a refusal to dwell below the gaze of gender, to reject objectification, and to withstand the disgrace and expectations imposed on ladies’s our bodies at this time. In the age of social media, the feminine physique has grow to be a consumable picture—what needs to be wholesome and pure is as a substitute distorted right into a “perfect figure.”
The butterfly, a creature usually symbolizing rebirth and freedom, grew to become a central motif all through my sequence. Beyond being a hanging visible aspect, it serves as an emblem carrying my deep craving for liberation and renewal.
Specimen
Li Yuxiang – Yu Hui (Third Prize)
Yu Hui is a photograph sequence I created in 2024, documenting my nephew. Living with him day in and day trip gave me the possibility to watch him carefully and actually get to know him.
He is a mischievous and energetic seven-year-old boy, properly cared for and guarded by his mother and father. Each day after waking, his best precedence is to play—freed from worries, freed from considerations. He finds limitless fascination in issues I would in any other case dismiss as meaningless: a bit of cardboard, or a pile of pesticide bottles, can maintain him fortunately engaged for hours.
From the surface, I watched him via my lens, capturing the valuable qualities of childhood that shine so clearly in him. In his world there aren’t any slender confines, no constraints, solely openness and freedom.
Shooting time : 2024.8.28
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