When Mom was waiting to be discharged from the ward during one of her earliest hospital stays, a nurse asked Mom whether she would miss her. Mom replied, “I won’t miss you, but I will remember you.”

Few people understood what she really meant with that but I knew she said that because she didn’t want to go back to the hospital and if she had said that she missed the nurses, she feared that she would return. So while she didn’t go to school, Mom learned enough English to be able to communicate, and in this case, very clearly.

This is my little tribute to a warrior, a braveheart, a comedian, and my dearest Mom.

I have spent much of my past three years setting up and running Pictures of the Year Asia(POY Asia) with Lynden Steele, Director of Pictures of the Year International(POYI). Two competitions later, we are proud that the first-ever POY Asia exhibition has opened at the Mindful Art Forum(MAF), a private gallery in Seoul, South Korea and will run from July 13 to September 3, 2022.  Founded in 1944 by University of Missouri Professor Cliff Edom, POY’s initial exhibit was entitled “The First Annual Fifty-Print Exhibition of New and Feature Pictures”. In honor of Edom’s first exhibit, the inaugural POY Asia exhibition features 50 award-winning images from the POY Asia 2022 competition. As part of the opening, a forum titled “The truth revealed by photojournalism and documentary photography in our era” was held at the gallery on July 12, 2022.