Co-initiated by Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and CHANEL, the Curatorial Programme for Photography and Moving Image announces the milestone achievements of its 2025/26 "Curatorial Engine"—the advanced section featuring five curatorial groups of the year.
Curatorial Programme for Photography and Moving Image is a profound extension of the four years of practice of the 2021-2024 Jimei x Arles "Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image" by the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and CHANEL. Driven by an initial mission to foster emerging curatorial talents in contemporary photography and moving image, the programme introduced an innovative mentorship mechanism alongside a tiered development framework combining “Curatorial Seminar” and “Curatorial Engine” in 2025. It aims to empower Chinese curators, researchers, and art project managers, cultivating new curatorial voices equipped with critical awareness and a pioneering spirit within the evolving context of visual culture, and aiding the development of outstanding original exhibition proposals. Over the past five years, this collaborative practice has attracted more than 360 applicants into the interdisciplinary research and curatorial practice centred on photography and moving image, with past curatorial outcomes presented in Beijing, Shanghai, and Xiamen in China, as well as in Singapore and Japan.
In November 2025, twelve curators gathered in Xiamen for the Jimei x Arles " Curatorial Seminar." They participated in a week-long immersive residency, featuring masterclasses , local field visits, proposal reviews, etc., while deeply engaging with the art scene of the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival. Among them, five advancing curators/curatorial groups with proposals centred the theme "Transcending the Line" entered the subsequent " Curatorial Engine" phase. Under the guidance of an advisory panel comprising 11 senior domestic and international curators, they underwent targeted refinement and proposal iterations. Ultimately, each proposal achieved thematic distillation, logical structuring, and narrative progression, resulting in curatorial outcomes for photography and moving image that combine a localised perspective with speculative depth:
- Curatorial Proposal: Body is Light (Original Title: The East Asian Body in the Post-Body Era: Practicing Existence at the Virtual-Real Junction)
The proposal places the "body" at the intersection of cross-regional history, platform algorithms and media technology. It establishes "flexibility" and "criticality" as the curatorial methodology, serving as the logical foundation for the adjustment of artwork selection and the exhibition layout. Through an interdisciplinary theoretical matrix, the proposal re-examines and defines the concept of "East Asia," transcending singular geographical limitations; furthermore, it expands the artist roster from China to include South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Mongolia. Additionally, the proposal adopts an evocative title, achieving a balance between academic discourse and public communication.
Curators: Gaia Group（Moham Zheng Wang, Ziqing Zhao）
Advisors: Gwen Lee (co-founder & director of DECK Photography Art Centre, co-founder & director of Singapore International Photography Festival), RongRong (contemporary photographer and the co-founder and co-director of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
2. Curatorial Proposal: Between Two Times of Seeing
Building upon its original core concept, the proposal has established a clear internal logic: the perception of "cracks" is explicitly delineated into the dual dimensions: "space/identity" and "time". Furthermore, the "two times" are refined into two levels: "the juxtapositions of early and recent works" and "the mainstream and the periphery of historical narratives". On this basis, the proposal has achieved the transformation from textual concepts to spatial vision. Meanwhile, the curator and artists engaged in in-depth dialogue on this topic, presenting the prospect of incorporating entirely new creations based on the exhibition's concept upon its actual realization.
Curator: Jin Qiuyu
Advisors: Taous Dahmani (art historian, curator at the Photographers’ Gallery), Pan Lu (Associate Professor at Department of Chinese History and Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, filmmaker and curator)
3. Curatorial Proposal: Weaving Under the Weight (Original Title: Sites of Precariousness)
The proposal has iterated from " Sites of Precariousness " to " Weaving Under the Weight". By strengthening the contextual commonalities among the artworks, a narrative thread has been constructed that progresses layer by layer from micro individuals to macro society. Consequently, this deepens the exploration of "precariousness" from a static emotional representation into a specific dissection of "relationships" and structural realities, effectively internalising theory into the exhibition's perspective.
Curator: Jiawen LI
Advisors: Liu Ding & Carol Yinghua Lu (curator, artistic director of the 8th Yokohama Triennale), WU Mali (Professor Emeritus of Graduate Institute of Interdisciplinary Art at Kaohsiung Normal University, practitioner of socially engaged art)
4. Curatorial Proposal: Afterglow
The proposal introduces Lai Lili's ontological thinking on “Force and Propensity", to explore the continuous extension of individual vitality following the dissolution of the Northeast China’s industrial history. By focusing on the endogenous potential embedded within the Northeast, the proposal threads together the images of local creators with those of mature artists. In terms of spatial design, it employs a montage approach, enabling the artworks to act as mutual forces and collectively construct a holistic field.
Curator: Rachel Wuang
Advisors: Dong Bingfeng (Curator, art critic), Bas Vroege (Curator and producer, founder and director of Paradox, a platform based in the Netherlands)
5. Curatorial Proposal: Dark Herbarium (Original Title: Rhododendron, Lemon, Palm, Cypress)
The proposal distils specific and scattered botanical cases into an expandable theoretical framework, centring on "Dark Botany" and adopting the herbarium as its methodology. Two new groups of artists have been added to the content, breaking the rigid symmetry of the original plan where four artists correspond to four plant hunters (and four locations). Furthermore, the display of archival materials has been de-emphasised, and they are instead integrated into the artworks. The diverse scenes within the original exhibition layout have been reconfigured into spatial divisions of a herbarium, together with the incorporation of sensory dimensions such as sound and scent, the proposal translates its concept into a "spatialised" presentation.
Curator: Zhang Wen
Advisors: Joanna Fu (photography and visual culture researcher, writer, curator), Yao Jui-Chung (artist, curator, part-time professor at School of Fine Arts, Taipei University of the Arts)
In alignment with the programming of the Jimei × Arles International Photo Festival, and the opinions of its Art Committee, selected outcomes from this year's "Curatorial Programme" will make their debut as exhibitions at the Jimei × Arles in Xiamen, opening in November 2026. Meanwhile, Three Shadows hopes to join hands with art institutions, museums and spaces to jointly facilitate the realisation and academic synergy of more outstanding proposal. For inquiries regarding exhibition partnerships, co-hosting opportunities, or to request the complete proposal dossiers, please contact us via email at: cppmi@threeshadows.cn.
In addition, the 2026 Jimei × Arles "Curatorial Seminar" will officially open for application in August. Curatorial Programme for Photography and Moving Image will continue to deepen its commitment to curatorial development in the field, providing a robust and long-term growth platform to drive cutting-edge curatorial thinking into the public sphere and infuse enduring vitality into the contemporary image art ecosystem.