Ruben Lundgren: “Great idea! What’s the budget?”

Ruben Lundgren, photographer and curator, born in 1983 in the Netherlands. He currently works and lives in Beijing. He graduated from China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2011. He made a name within the conceptual photography duo WassinkLundgren with publications as Empty Bottles (2007) and Tokyo Tokyo (2010). FOAM showed a retrospect of their work in 2013.

He works as a photojournalist for Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant and as an independent curator of Chinese photography. Together with Martin Parr, he co-edited The Chinese Photobook (2015). Other publications include Hlleo? (2018) and MeNu (2018) a tasty collection of Chinese vernacular food photography.

As a guest curator of BredaPhoto 2020, he curated China Imagined, offering 24 contemporary photography projects from China including the sticker album Wow Taobao. In 2021 he edited the book Ellen Thorbecke: From Peking to Paris, and published Real Dreams with his journalistic works made all over China.

His photographs and books are collected by various private and public collections and have also been exhibited at international galleries and museums including FOAM photography museum (Amsterdam), The Archive of Modern Conflict (London) and Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (Beijing).