Posts Tagged ‘Miho Watanabe’
2025 MULLINS CONCEPTUAL PHOTOGRAPHY PRIZE
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2025 Mullins Conceptual Photography Priz
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2025 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize
Muswellbrook Regional Art Centre 14 August – 11 October 2025
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The Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize seeks artist entities that challenge the viewer via the illustration of a concept rather than being merely illustrative or representational.
The work must be primarily photographic but not to the exclusion of mixed media and three dimensional objects.
The Australian Photographic Society’s Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize is a national $30,000 acquisitive prize that seeks to find Australia’s best conceptual photographic works. Finalists of the prize are exhibited annually at Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre with the prize-winning work joining the Muswellbrook Shire Art Collection, and a collection of contemporary photographic works acquired through the Muswellbrook Photographic Award (1987 – 2014). Means of work presentation are unrestricted, inviting photographers to illustrate the intent of their works through a myriad of mediums.
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Antares Wells Assistant Curator MCA PHOTO: liya Cohen Headshots
ABOUT THE ADJUDICATOR (From the APS Instagram)
This year’s sole adjudicator is Antares Wells, Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Antares is a curator and writer with a specialisation in photography. Previously, she was Curator at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
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THE 30 FINALISTS (Selected from 366 entries)
Images supplied by the Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize. “Click” on the image to enlarge entry and to see maker and title.
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Antares Wells announces the Prize-cropped
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THE ADJUDICATOR’S ADDRESS AND PRIZE ANNOUNCEMENT
Good afternoon everyone, and thank you all for coming. It’s wonderful to see so many people here celebrating contemporary photography. My name is Antares Wells and I am Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. It’s an honour to have been invited by the Australian Photographic Society to judge the 2025 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize and I am thrilled to be here with you today. I’d like to acknowledge the Wonnarua people as the traditional custodians of the lands on which we are gathering tonight and I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.
This year’s Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize received hundreds of entries from across the country and I am delighted to have selected 30 finalists for this exhibition. The work presented here spans the breadth of contemporary photographic practice in Australia.
Artists Justine Roche, Nicholas Hubicki, Claire Paul and Isabella Capezio engage thoughtfully with the natural environment and its relationship to photography, presenting work that reflects a deep consideration of materials. Works by Carolyn Craig, Shea Kirk and David Rosetzky critically consider the body, desire and the self. Artists Mungo Howard, Angus Brown, Lisa Stonham and Annabelle McEwen mine the relationships between photography and other media, such as painting and sculpture, encouraging us to think critically about what a photograph is.
Works by Skye Wagner, Claudia Nicholson, Darron Davies and Callan Skimin reframe existing found and archival imagery, creating new image worlds in the process that harness the photograph’s associative power. Artists Jeremy Drape, Jessie Turner and Julie Purdie experiment with perception and the capacity of the lens to frame a world.
Works by Dylan Marriott, George Angelovski, Kathy Mackey, and Tamara Voninski experiment with colour and form, while artists Izabela Pluta and Yvette Hamilton consider sites of photographic history and practice through formally ambitious works. Finally, Miho Watanabe, Hilary Wardhaugh, Ali Tahayori, Lilah Benetti, and Minami Ivory explore memory, trauma, loss, and possible futures, in quietly affecting and powerful ways.
For those of you drawn to processes of technical experimentation, you are in for a treat. We have artists who are working in new ways with historical processes, such as salt prints, wet collodion and opalotypes; we have artists inventing new processes, such as ‘chemography’; and we have artists working critically with new technologies such as 3D printing, moulding, and Artificial Intelligence.
As you can imagine, with this group of finalists it was incredibly difficult to identify a winner, and I thank Elissa, Brian and Roger for their patience over the past 48 hours!
Johanna Ng – a woman wearing a choker is walking in a crowd, 2024
I am delighted to announce that the winner of the 2025 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize is Johanna Ng, for her work a woman wearing a choker is walking in a crowd (2024). Drawn from her broader body of work every asian in sex and the city, Johanna’s work utilises screenshots of Asian extras in the TV show, often glimpsed in the background. Johanna writes in her statement: I “photographed the extras in new compositions” and then “fed these compositions through Google’s image-to-text and then text-to-image AI engines. Ultimately, an image of an Asian woman becomes ‘a woman’ and the text ‘a woman’ conjures the image of a white one.”
Johanna’s work is visually compelling and turns on its ability to make you stop, look, and then look again. There’s a dimensionality to it best experienced in person, which gives form to questions of visibility, erasure, and the biases structuring the image and text generation systems that are increasingly shaping how we see, think and behave. Congratulations, Johanna!
I am also pleased to award two works as Highly Commended:
Mungo Howard – Studio Window, 2025
Congratulations to Mungo Howard for his work Studio Window (2025), a beautiful work hovering somewhere between painting, sculpture and photography, turning on the power of introspection.
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Miho Watanabe – Awareness of Between-ness A Day After My Father’s Departure – Self-Portrait in His Room on His Chair, 2025
Congratulations to Miho Watanabe for his work Awareness of Betweenness: A Day after My Father’s Departure – Self-Portrait in His Room on His Chair (2025), a quietly affecting meditation on memory, grief and the passage of time.
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Congratulations to all of the finalists, and thank you again to Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre and the Australian Photographic Society for having me as this year’s judge.
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The Adjudicator Antares Wells with the winning entry
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SOME DOCUMENTATION OF THE EXHIBITION OPENING EVENT
“Click” on the image to enlarge and see the caption.
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SPONSORS OF THE MCPP
The 2025 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize is made possible by the Australian Photographic Society in partnership with the Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre, and with the support of Bengalla Mining Company, MACH Energy, Malabar Coal, AGL Hunter, and Australian Photography Magazine.
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SEE OUR BLOG POST FOR THE
2023 MULLINS CONCEPTUAL PHOTOGRAPHY PRIZE
“Click” the link HERE
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POSTSCRIPT: THE WINNER JOHANNA NG VISITS EXHIBITION
Johanna Ng+Roger Skinner with Max Watters’ statue PHOTO: Andrew
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Mullins poster
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Adjudicator’s address ©Antares Wells
All photographs of the MCPP exhibition at the Muswellbrook Regional Art Centre are ©Doug Spowart
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