Invited photographers
Rotterdam Photo 2025 – Invited photographers
This year at Rotterdam Photo, we’re excited to welcome four invited photographers whose work deeply resonates with our 2025 theme: Shared/Connected.
Through personal histories, cultural narratives, and explorations of technology, each artist offers a powerful lens on what it means to be connected—to place, to memory, to each other. Their stories cross borders and generations, reminding us that photography is not just about capturing moments, but about sharing them.
Yixi Tian
Veiled by the Cloud
Miao medicine, a unique branch of traditional Chinese medicine, plays a vital role in some mountainous areas of China, where access to modern healthcare remains limited. With its rich knowledge of herbal remedies, traditional healing techniques, and personalized treatments, Miao doctors not only offer physical healing but also provide spiritual support deeply embedded in local culture. Their practices reflect a holistic view of life, where the body, nature, and community are inseparably connected.
Since 2022, I have followed my mother, who learned herbal medicine from Miao doctors, into the mountains of my hometown in the Qiandongnan region of Guizhou, observing and photographing these practitioners.
Through this process, I am not only documenting their daily practices and the lives they sustain but also reconnecting with the legacy of my own family. The project explores how traditional knowledge systems persist in the face of modernity. In an era when healthcare is increasingly standardized, the resilience of Miao medicine highlights the importance of care rooted in personal relationships, local ecology, and cultural traditions. It is not only an alternative way of healing but also a way of understanding the world—one that values slowness, mutual trust, and the subtle balance between humans and nature.
The title comes from the final line of a well-known classical Chinese poem about seeking a recluse who gathers herbs in the mountains:
“He stays deep in the mountain,I know not where, veiled by the cloud
(只在此山中，云深不知处）
It evokes the sense of secluded lives and hidden knowledge, reflecting the invisible yet enduring presence of Miao doctors in the landscape.
Find out more:
Website: tianyixi.com
Instagram: @tc2h4
Igor Schiller
Familiar Characters
Familiar Characters is a photographic series following the journey of an adult stepping back into childhood. Created over three years in Serbia, it reimagines the landscapes of home into vivid, dreamlike worlds in which the past lingers, reshaped through play and imagination. The old family house stands at the heart of this journey, a stage where time bends and childhood figures return as silent companions. As colors grow richer and characters take form, the line between remembering and reinventing begins to blur. What started as a search for fragments of memory became an unfolding tale of identity and belonging.
Find out more:
Website: igorschiller.com
Instagram: @igorschiller
Mark Engelen
A2025ODDITY
Although his original series was back in 2011, with the coming of AI, Mark has prolonged the story of Major Tom. Not only to experiment with the boundless possibilities AI offers but also to continue a series without the limitations Mark has set himself back in ’11.
In this original series the goal was to visualize what might have happened to the illuster astronaut Major Tom (from David Bowies Space Oddity) in which Mark saw a parallel with his relationship breakup back then. A project kept pure without the means of photoshop or any other form of digital manipulation other then adjusting grading. Everything depicted was actually there. Form the space capsule to the leather space suit.
In ’24 Major Tom has returned once more in Marks life. But now via the means of Artificial Intelligence. His goal; to see what AI can add to or alter in the original works. Searching for surreal, abstract and futuristic landscapes in which Major Tom is a passer by.
With doing so Mark likes to raise the question what parameters make the work still his and at what point has he got no creative influence anymore and determines the algorithm of AI the outcome. And therefore is AI the creative in the next fase of Major Tom’s journey.
Now in ’25, we get to see another glimpse of Major Tom at Rotterdam Photo Festival. The goal this time; what does an audience do with the freedom of creating their own Major Tom or what happens if we give AI complete freedom of re-rendering certain images form the ’24 series without Mark directing the art.
Find out more:
Website: markengelen.com
Instagram: @markengelenphotography
Kriss Munsya
Genetic Bomb
Genetic Bomb is an interrogation of Blackness, diaspora and identity that I have been conceptually developing for many years. This interrogation has evolved into a photography series that I have been working on since the beginning of 2022 and that I shot in November and December 2022 in the Congo (DRC). My own life and experiences have inspired me to take this project from concept to artistic creation.
I was born in Kinshasa, DRC and moved with my parents to Belgium when I was two years old. Like many people who have experienced similar emigrations, I carry generational guilt, confusion and disenchantment. Guilt of being a chosen one, one who was granted the opportunity to escape poverty, insecurity and war that colonialism created. Confusion stemming from the realization that the warmth, love and energy of my family’s native land could never be replaced, no matter where we went. And disenchantment from realizing the place we grew up upheld, and continues to uphold, racism and white supremacy directed against us.
These realizations raised several questions.
How are we supposed to come together with our homeland? How can we embrace our roots and at the same time live in a system that is poisoning them? How can we love if we are a product of hate? Are we doomed to reproduce the same colonial patterns or do we have the ingredients within ourselves to create a change… a GENETIC BOMB
Find out more:
Website: krissmunsya.com
Instagram: @krissmunsya
