PHOTOBOOK DUMMY AWARD 2025 JUDGE
*In no particular order
Andreas Müller-Pohle
Andreas Müller-Pohle is a Berlin-based media artist and publisher. He is the founder of European Photography, an independent art magazine for international contemporary photography, new media and artificial intelligence, which celebrates its 45th anniversary this year. He has edited the major works of media philosopher Vilém Flusser, including the seminal Philosophy of Photography. Andreas has published and exhibited extensively, and his photographic, video, and computer works are in numerous private and museum collections worldwide. He has been a visiting professor and lecturer at numerous institutions in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. His current theoretical and practical focus is on the intersection of photography and artificial intelligence.
Charis Poon
Charis Poon is an artist and educator who makes zines, audio pieces, draws comics, writes, and teaches. Across these media, her practice focuses on the everyday, on contemplation, on close relationships. Charis worked as a freelance graphic designer and editor for most of her professional career, with forays in creative strategy and podcasting. After finishing her MA in Design Expanded Practice at Goldsmiths University of London, she moved back to Hong Kong, where she calls home. Now, she teaches Social Design at the PolyU School of Design where she experiments with how teaching and learning takes place. She is interested in poetics in communication, learning through making, slow growth, and collective endeavors.
Kurt Tong
Kurt was born in Hong Kong in 1977 and earned his MA in Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication in 2006. His projects explore his Chinese roots and understanding of his motherland.
Since then, he has published several monographs exploring themes ranging from Chinese funeral offerings to the Asian diaspora to self-combed women. His work has been shown worldwide, including exhibitions at the Himalayas Museum in Shanghai, the Times Art Museum in Beijing, the Finnish Museum of Photography, Rencontres d’Arles, and The Photographers’ Gallery in London.
In 2022, he was awarded the prestigious Prix Elysee and released “Dear Franklin,” an epistolary novel about a tragic love story during WWII in China. MOMA New York named it one of the best photo books of 2022. In 2024, he published “Krampus,” a book about the Alpine Christmas monster, which was accompanied by a multi-sensory exhibition alongside a concert in Innsbruck, Austria.
Michelle Chan
Michelle Chan is a relational artist who works primarily in photography. She uses the camera and manipulated images to generate connections and conversations with people. Her works often touch upon the notion of home, sense of belonging, human connections and bonding, and familial relationships. More specifically, they reflect the inherited familial beliefs that inform our daily gestures and rituals, and explore the Chinese beliefs that have become recurrent over centuries. She is the founder of Phoboko, a platform that brings people together through photobooks and the topics they contain. As a community, Phoboko interrogates photography as a medium, promotes the vision of local Hong Kong artists while in dialogue with other photographers in the Asia-Pacific region.
Zhen SHI
Zhen SHI works across various mediums, combining photography, book objects, and fiction-documentary narratives to create a complex interplay of storytelling. Through the artificial manipulation of individuals’ lived experiences and intervention in intellectual legacies, her practice explores the intricate relationship between reality and memory, often within the broader themes of “Archive and Fiction” and “Private and Public.”
In 2015, Shi founded La Maison de Z, a French publishing house dedicated to visual art, contemporary photography, and independent publications, using publishing as a form of research, examining the intricate dynamics between memory and reality. From concept to design, visual imagery to material choices, La Maison de Z continually pushes the boundaries of paper as a medium while investigating the role of art books as a unique language.
Zhuang Wubin
Zhuang Wubin is a writer who makes photographs, publications and exhibitions. He is interested in photography’s entanglements with modernity, colonialism, nationalism, “Chineseness” and the Cold War in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong.
Zhuang is a recipient of the Prince Claus Fund research grant (2010) and a Lee Kong Chian research fellow at the National Library Board (NLB) of Singapore (Dec 2017 to Jun 2018). He is the major grantee of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Grant 2018. He has been invited to research residency programmes at Institute Technology of Bandung (2013), Asia Art Archive (AAA), Hong Kong (2015), Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2017) and the Ha Bik Chuen Archive Project at AAA (2018). He is the contributing curator of the Chiang Mai Photo Festival (2015, 2017, 2020).
Published by NUS Press, Photography in Southeast Asia: A Survey (2016) is his fourth book.
PHOTOZINE AWARD 2025 JUDGE
*in no particular order
Charis Poon
Charis Poon is an artist and educator who makes zines, audio pieces, draws comics, writes, and teaches. Across these media, her practice focuses on the everyday, on contemplation, on close relationships. Charis worked as a freelance graphic designer and editor for most of her professional career, with forays in creative strategy and podcasting. After finishing her MA in Design Expanded Practice at Goldsmiths University of London, she moved back to Hong Kong, where she calls home. Now, she teaches Social Design at the PolyU School of Design where she experiments with how teaching and learning takes place. She is interested in poetics in communication, learning through making, slow growth, and collective endeavors.
Michelle Chan
Michelle Chan is a relational artist who works primarily in photography. She uses the camera and manipulated images to generate connections and conversations with people. Her works often touch upon the notion of home, sense of belonging, human connections and bonding, and familial relationships. More specifically, they reflect the inherited familial beliefs that inform our daily gestures and rituals, and explore the Chinese beliefs that have become recurrent over centuries. She is the founder of Phoboko, a platform that brings people together through photobooks and the topics they contain. As a community, Phoboko interrogates photography as a medium, promotes the vision of local Hong Kong artists while in dialogue with other photographers in the Asia-Pacific region.
Paul Yeung
Paul Yeung Tak-ming is a freelance photographer, an educator and a curator. He graduated from MA in Image and Communication (Photography) at Goldsmiths College, London. Yeung embarked on his profession as a photojournalist and photo editor and received numerous photography awards in the past 20 years. His contemporary works mostly concern social situation expressed in a humorous sense and are interested in the genres, narrative and appropriation of photographic language. Yeung opened his first solo photography exhibition “The Flower Show” in 2012. He published his first photobook “Yes Madam, Sorry Ah Sir” in 2017. Yeung was also one of the founding members of several local independent photozines, including “Mahjong”, “Not Accord With…” and “Fu Pao Mary”. His other favorite works include “The Advertising Billboard is Nothing”, “The Good Old Days in 1989”, “No Paint No Games”, “Dark Light” etc., His works and photobooks were exhibited internationally and were collected by The Hong Kong Heritage Museum and private collectors.