About WMA Masters


The WMA Masters is a non-profit photography award aiming to nurture the growth of photography as an art form, and to spark discussions of social issues of great importance to Hong Kong through visual images.


Theme


LIGHT


Prizes


The winner of the award
Finalists

Zoher Abdoolcarim

Based in Hong Kong, Zoher Abdoolcarim was appointed as Asia Editor, TIME International, in June 2008 overseeing TIME’s award-winning Asia edition. Prior to this role, he was a senior editor at TIME Asia, a position he held since 2002 where he helped shape all aspects of TIME’s coverage of Asia. His cover stories include a June 2007 article on the 10th anniversary of the British handover of Hong Kong to China, a November 2011 lead essay comparing China and India, and a prologue on India ahead of its landmark May 2014 elections. Zoher also writes commentary on Asian affairs for TIME.

Prior to joining TIME Asia, Zoher was managing editor of Asiaweek and an editor at Singapore-owned Asian Business. Over the course of his career, Zoher has been a foreign correspondent based in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, with reporting assignments in the Philippines, India, Brunei and Hong Kong. He has been involved in watershed Asia stories including the Ninoy Aquino assassination, the ousters of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and former Indonesian President Suharto, the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing, Hong Kong’s handover to China, the Asian financial crisis and the continuing impact of the rise of China on the region and the world.

Over the years, Zoher has interviewed many of Asia’s leaders. An ethnic Indian born and raised in Hong Kong, Zoher is a fluent Cantonese speaker and a British national. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

But Ho Ming

But Ho Ming is a retired planner in telecommunications and information services, which endured drastic and disruptive transformation in technology, organization, and market structure in the past 4 decades.  His current projects provide robotic and analytic solutions to social groups, including school-age children, who aspire for a more sustainable but well-informed life in the age of Big Data.  In his leisure, Ho Ming enjoys organic farming, hiking, robotic dance choreographing and on-line chess games. Ho Ming is a trustee of the WYNG Foundation.

Clément Chéroux

Senior Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Since 2013, Clément Chéroux has served as Chief Curator of the Department of Photography for the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and joined that museum as Curator of Photography in 2007. Prior to that, he lectured on the history of photography at the University of Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne, the University of Paris III and the University of Lausanne, and served as executive editor of the magazine Études Photographiques published by the Société Française de photographie. Chéroux has also served as an independent curator. As author or editor, Chéroux has published more than 40 books and catalogs on photography and its history.

Chéroux earned a PhD in Art History from the University of Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne, an MA in Aesthetics, Technology and Artistic Creation from the University of Paris VIII and a degree from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, Arles. He was a visiting research fellow in the Art History Department at Princeton University and a guest scholar at the J. Paul Getty Museum Photography Department.

Chéroux was awarded the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit (Knight) for the exhibition, Edvard Munch, the Modern Eye, the Nadar Award for Photography Book of the Year for La subversion des images, surréalism, photographie, film (with Quentin Bajac) and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire for The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (with Andreas Fischer).

May Fung

May Fung created over 10 short experimental films between 1977 and 1985 and over 20 video works from 1986 onwards. She subsequently created video installations and pioneered  video art in theatre. Fung is passionate about the development of visual and performing arts, and received a fellowship from the Asian Culture Council for researching video art in New York in 1994. In 1999 Fung was awarded the Hong Kong Arts Development Council “Arts Development Scholarship” for video installation art. She has been an assessor and juror for various video and film festivals/exhibition in Hong Kong, and is now an examiner and advisor to the Home Affairs Bureau and Hong Kong Arts Development Council.  Fung is also the Chair of Art & Culture Outreach, a non-profit charitable arts organisation in Hong Kong and the honorary treasurer of Fresh Wave Film Festival Limited.

Brendan Embser

Brendan Embser is the managing editor of Aperture magazine. He is the editor of the Aperture books Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018), Chloe Dewe Mathews: Caspian: The Elements (2018), and Ethan James Green: Young New York (2019), and the managing editor of Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present (2018). Embser has served on the jury for the Addis Foto Fest, the Changjiang International Photography and Video Art Biennale, Photo Is:rael, and the Sony World Photography Awards. Formerly the director of exhibitions at The Walther Collection, Embser holds a BA in English from Haverford College and an MA in Africana Studies from New York University, and he has contributed essays and interviews to Another Africa, Contemporary And, n+1, Objektiv, Aperture Online, and Aperture’s PhotoBook Review.

Yumi Goto

Yumi Goto is an independent photography curator, editor, researcher, consultant, educator and publisher who focuses on the development of cultural exchanges that transcend borders.

She collaborates with local and international artists who live and work in areas affected by conflict, natural disasters, current social problems, human rights abuses and women’s issues. She often works with human rights advocates, international and local NGOs, humanitarian organizations and as well as being involved as a nominator and juror for the international photographic organizations, festivals and events.
She is now based in Tokyo and also a co-founder and curator for the Reminders Photography Stronghold which is a curated membership gallery space in Tokyo enabling a wide range of photographic activities.

Zhuang Wubin

Zhuang Wubin is a writer, curator and artist.

As a writer/curator, Zhuang focuses on the photographic practices of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. He uses the medium as a prism to explore the following trajectories: photography and Chineseness, periodicals and photobooks as sites of historiography, and photography’s entanglements with nationalism and the Cold War.

Zhuang is an editorial board member of Trans-Asia Photography Review, recipient of the Prince Claus Fund research grant (2010) and a Lee Kong Chian research fellow at the National Library of Singapore (Dec 2017 to Jun 2018). He is a 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 a contributing curator of the Chiang Mai Photo Festival (2015, 2017).

Published by NUS Press, Photography in Southeast Asia: A Survey(2016) is his fourth book.  

As an artist, Zhuang uses photography and text to visualise the shifting experiences of Chineseness in Southeast Asia.