Alan Lim

Sim Chi Yin is a photographer based in Beijing. She is a member of VII Photo Agency.

Chi Yin was a finalist in W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography with a personal project on Chinese gold miners in 2013.

She is on the British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch list of photographers in 2014. She was also among the PDN30—Photo District News’ top 30 emerging photographers—in 2013.

She works on projects on social issues in the region, and since going freelance in 2011 has also done photo, multimedia and video commissions for TIME, The New York Times, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Le Monde, Newsweek, Vogue USA, GQ France, Financial Times Weekend Magazine, New York Times Magazine, and Stern.

In 2010, she was awarded a Magnum Foundation “Photography and Human Rights” fellowship at New York University.

Her work has also been shown and collected by art galleries, auction houses and foundations in Paris and New York.

A fourth-generation overseas Chinese, Chi Yin was born and grew up in Singapore. She did history and international relations degrees at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Chi Yin was a journalist and foreign correspondent for The Straits Times, Singapore’s national English language daily, for nine years before quitting to focus on documentary photography.

She sometimes dreams in mute, black-and-white mode, but in real life is fascinated by colour and light, and is at home in both English and Mandarin Chinese.

Last Updated: December 1, 2015

Photo Gallery

12.01.15

Life After Death

Sim Chi Yin
A family mourns the loss of a husband and father, who died after a decade-long fight against silicosis contracted while working in China’s gold mines. He was one of an estimated 6 million workers in China who have some form of pneumoconiosis, the...

Media

07.02.15

On the Border

Sim Chi Yin
Minutes after we turned off the main road and into the Tumen Economic Development Zone, we spotted a group of workers weeding along an access road.From afar, all we could make out in the gentle early morning light was that they were women in...

Video

06.10.15

A Miner’s China Dream

Sim Chi Yin
Over the four years I have known him, He Quangui, a gold miner from Shaanxi, has told me many times he wants to travel with me back to Beijing. It’s not just me he wants to visit. He dreams of going to the Chinese leadership’s compound, Zhongnanhai...

Video

10.16.12

The Rat Tribe

Sim Chi Yin from VII Magazine
The evening sun sits low in the smoggy Beijing sky. Beneath a staid, maroon apartment block, Jiang Ying, 24, is stirring from her bed after having slept through the day. Day is night and night is day anyway in the window-less world she inhabits...

Recommended Links

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New York Times
09.08.15

In 1949, Sim Chi Yin’s grandfather, Shen Huansheng, a school principal and chief editor for the leftist Ipoh Daily newspaper, became a “Communist martyr.” A monument in Gaoshang with the inscription, “The tomb of martyr Shen Huansheng” proves it.

Topics: History
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Multimedia Week
06.29.15

Sharron Lovell speaks with Sim Chi Yin about crossing the lines between journalism and advocacy. Chi Yin recently published her four year story following a Chinese gold miner suffering with the lung disease silicosis, caused by years of inhaling coal dust.

Topics: Health, Media, Politics
A Short Film Shows China’s True Cost of Gold
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National Geographic
05.15.15

This is the unseen cost of gold mining in China—the world’s top gold producer. In China, silicosis is considered a form of pneumoconiosis, which affects an estimated six million workers who toil in gold, coal, or silver mines or in stone-cutting factories. It’s the country’s most prevalent occupational disease.

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National Geographic
05.15.15

This is the unseen cost of gold mining in China—the world’s top gold producer. In China, silicosis is considered a form of pneumoconiosis, which affects an estimated six million workers who toil in gold, coal, or silver mines or in stone-cutting factories. It’s the country’s most prevalent occupational disease.

Topics: Health
via
New York Times
02.11.13

The passing coal miners in remote Shaanxi Province took one look at our marooned Audi and walked on, leaving us stuck on the sleet-covered mountain road. As dusk fell, I managed to mingle with some young migrant workers, and trek with them through a snowy mountain pass and onto the last bus for the day. “We thought you were rich city people,...

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New York Times
09.11.12

 (Part 2) Li Zhensheng, a newspaper photographer who was active in the 1960s in northern China, documented the country’s Cultural Revolution, in honest, cinematic images.

Topics: Arts, Media
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New York Times
09.10.12

Li Zhensheng’s photographs of the Culutural Revolution are perhaps the most complete and nuanced pictorial account of the decade of turmoil ignited by Mao Zedong.Mr. Li was a photojournalist for the local paper in Harbin, capital of China’s northernmost province of Heilongjiang. That is where he did his life’s work documenting...

Topics: Arts, Politics
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Foreign Policy
06.18.12

Picture Beijing, and a skyline of fancy steel architecture and clouds of smog likely come to mind. But the most fitting metaphor for the city's growing pains may lie beneath its streets: In the past two decades, underground storage basements, parking lots, and air-raid shelters have found new life as apartments, partitioned into untold...

Topics: Urban Life