Independent writer, Curator and Artist, Singapore

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 received his PhD by Published Work (Research–Photography) from University of Westminster, London.

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). Zhuang 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. In 2019, Zhuang received the J Dudley Johnston Award and Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain for that publication. The Chinese translation is published in 2019 by VOP BOOKS, Taipei.

Zhuang is a founding member of Writing Foto (writingfoto.wordpress.com), a growing collection of writings on photography loosely directed at the imaginaries of South/east Asia.