Sony World Photography Awards 2025 S'pore shutterbug strikes gold

Student Ng Guang Ze wins two awards for tranquil shot of winding stream near China's Wenhai Lake

- Stephanie Yeow

A whole lot of patience and a stroke of beginner's luck. Singaporean photographer Ng Guang Ze attributes these two factors to his double win at the recent Sony World Photography Awards.

The fourth-year architecture student from the National University of Singapore impressed with his other-worldly Curved Stream image. It is a tranquil black-and-white scene of a stream meandering through the grasslands of Wenhai Lake in Lijiang, in China's Yunnan province. The Yulong Snow Mountain looms on the horizon.

Curved Stream clinched the 25-year-old the national award for Singapore, plus a second award in the landscape category in the open competition. His photo trumped 419,000 other images from more than 200 countries and territories submitted for the prestigious contest, now in its 18th year.

The journey to create the photograph spanned far and wide. It began in September 2024 when Mr Ng travelled to Beijing for a four-month exchange semester at Tsinghua University.

While in China, his love for photography and travel took him to the beautiful landscapes of Urumqi in Xinjiang, as well as Lijiang in Yunnan.

He decided to visit Yunnan in December 2024 after noticing on Chinese social media that the south-west province was trending as a tourism hot spot.

He chose to explore the Wenhai area instead of hitting the Yulong Snow Mountain trail, the usual tourist route. He knew he wanted to include the mountain in his photograph, rather than shoot from it.