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.