Friday 11/07/2015
PhD alumni Dr. ZHUANG Wubin returns to CREAM as a recipient of the British Academy 2025 Visiting Fellowship. This prestigious grant enables Dr. Zhuang to research the role of salon photography (or Pictorialism) in making and visualising Southeast Asian nations during periods of decolonisation.
Through archival research, Salon Photography and the Making of the Nation: Malay(si)a, Singapore, and Burma (Myanmar) in the 1950s and the 1960s, focuses on the salon photographers and resurfaces their interactions with patrons, politicians, state officials and other cultural workers. Dr. Zhuang’s project contends that their connections shaped the praxis of salon photography, and the latter was implicated in the political project of nation-building during decolonisation and the Cold War. The project asks: How did the photographers utilise salon photography to materialise different visions of the nation during this period? What do the archival traces of salon photography tell us about their differing and intersecting desires in nation-building?
Dr. Zhuang’s project proposes new ways of studying salon photography by focusing on its production, dissemination, and consumption. While Pictorialism had originated from Western Europe and America, the colloquial term of “salon photography” is more widely used by its practitioners in Southeast Asia. The project prioritises the term to indicate its continued importance in Southeast Asia today and to mark the local transformations of its praxis, underscoring the role that the ethnic Chinese photographers played in sustaining the practice across Southeast Asia.
The British Academy award enables Dr. Zhuang to spend six months in London researching archival materials at the National Archives, British Library, and the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
CREAM is recruiting a Research Associate to assist in the archival research and organisation of its public programme. This part-time, fixed-term role requires excellent command of the Burmese language. Please click here for further information and apply by 25 July 2025.
This project is a significant part of CREAM’s initiative to decentre art and cultural practices and knowledge. Dr. Zhuang and the appointed Research Associate will be working with Prof May Adadol Ingawanij, and with Dr Lucy Soutter, co-founder of the CREAM-associated Global Photographies Network.
About the British Academy Visiting Fellow
Dr. 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. In 2021, Dr. Zhuang received his PhD by Published Work from the CREAM Doctoral Programme.