Zexuan Zeng at the 41st Critics' Choice Award Winners for 2025 and  Top Pick

Thousands of photo projects and individual images were submitted this year from over 120 countries worldwide for the Critics' Choice Awards. The LensCulture Critics' Choice Awards are unlike any other photography awards. This competition is open to photographers of all ages and experience levels from cultures around the world. There are no theme requirements, no genre restrictions, and no restrictive guidelines. 

For the Critics' Choice Award, the 19 internationally renowned experts on this year's jury were asked to each select three personal favourites to win an award. For each selection, we asked the experts to write a brief explanation of why the winners caught their attention so much that they were awarded a Critics' Choice Award. KHM graduate Zexuan Zeng was not only nominated for his thesis “The Internal Crusade,” but was also included in the Top Pick selection, meaning that he and nine other artists will be honored next year in New York with prize money of $1,000 and a group exhibition.

Zexuan Zeng (*1997) was born in eastern South China and began studying visual communication at Shanghai Normal University (SHNU) in 2015. A year later, he began working as a freelance artist and designer. In 2021, he moved to Germany to study at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM), where he graduated in 2025 with his thesis ‘The Internal Crusade’. Zeng is actively involved in photography, writing, video and graphic design. His artistic interest lies in controlling the emotional flow in photography, particularly in relation to the boundaries between documentation and fiction, as well as the self-referential nature of memory. His works have been exhibited in various countries, including China, Germany and Japan.

The Internal Crusade: In 1934, in the midst of the Chinese Civil War and faced with the advancing troops of the Kuomintang, the Communist Party of China began the Long March, a military retreat from Jiangxi to a new headquarters in Yan'an. In the summer of 2024, Zexuan Zeng, who was born and raised in Ganzhou Jiangxi, spent two months retracing the route of the Long March and documenting the people and places along the way. Zeng's camera has a penetrating quality: in one image, an endless stack of communist flags fills a room; elsewhere, someone displays his carefully preserved military uniform on the balcony of a small apartment; and on an empty street, the only movement visible is a statue being cleaned. In the series ‘Internal Crusade,’ Zeng explores the consequences of an unfinished revolution and how it shapes our perception of history, grief, and self-image.