Chia Huang knows how to allow the image to do the talking – now her ability is combined with the declarative power of make-up

Photography by Chia Huang
Make-up by Peter Philips using Dior Beauty

Since 2017, Dior Beauty has sponsored a prize at the Rencontres d’Arles, the prestigious photography festival held in the ancient city of Arles, southern France. This year’s winner of the 2024 Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents was Chia Huang, who was selected from 13 nominees by a jury headed by Brigitte Lacombe. The jury lauded Huang for her deep connection to her subjects in her project Silence is Speaking, a series of images portraying the lives of two boys living with non-verbal autism. Huang discovered her subjects after noticing sketches drawn in the background of a Taiwanese newspaper and travelled to the fishing and farming town Taitung, where the boys live with their father. The resulting body of work is a playful and sensitive depiction of the lives of her subjects and their ability to express themselves without language.

Hot on the heels of her win, TANK commissioned Huang to shoot a story with Dior Beauty’s creative and image director Peter Phillips. For this series, Huang worked collaboratively with her subjects to make art in the purest sense of the word, as a form of play and as a means of transcendence. Make-up is another medium by which the individual can experiment with self-expression and self-determination – to play with who we are, and how we might communicate without words. Jackson Mount