Kayin Luys
22.04.2024

LUCA Student Kayin Luys wins "World Photography Award" in Global Student Competition

The Sony World Photography Awards is one of the world’s biggest and most prestigious photography competitions, celebrating the work of leading and emerging practitioners and attracting tens of thousands of visitors annually to its exhibitions worldwide.

Sony world photography awards is comparable with the Oscars awards in the film world. 

We are thrilled that our Student Kayin Luys, LUCA School of Arts, Visual Arts Photography, Campus Sint Lukas Brussels, has won the prestigious World Photography Award in the Global Student Competition category. 

About Kayin Luys

With a background in journalism, Kayin Luys’ main interest in his artistic practice is how fact and fiction are (re)present(ed) in photography. He often starts his series by observing his surroundings and making interventions to those situations, resulting in a stiffened, colourful, and partly fictional, universe.
 
In ‘Don’t Trust Pretty Girls’, he explores his relationship with his family in-law. He staged situations based on stories and memories the family confided in him. Using both existing and invented narratives, a play of possibilities opens a new space to the viewer. Tension between the real, fantasy and the unknown, leaves room to question what you see. Confronting his audience with a ‘family’, Luys hopes to let them wonder about what kind of roles we play and fulfil in our surroundings.
 
The title ‘Don’t Trust Pretty Girls’ refers to the tattoo on the grandfather's left arm. It starts a process of subjective interpretation. He is convinced that, even though the viewer looks at the photographs with their personal baggage, the perceptions of depicted narratives are heavily influenced by conventions of popular media and the structure of society. As there is no way to escape these conventions, he decided to actively use them by setting up a highly controlled, personal dramaturgy.
 
Kayin Luys (BE, 1999) is currently finishing his master’s studies at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. In 2021, he graduated from the Erasmus Hogeschool in Brussels with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, followed by a bachelor’s in photography at LUCA School of Arts in 2023. Kayin’s work has been included in different exhibitions, been printed in publications such as Opus One, and he now is the winner of the Sony World Photography Awards in the category Global Students Competition.