WEAI Student Journal ‘The Reed’ Returns, After a Break, in Print and PDF
Events in Bhutan, China, and South Korea inspired this year's prizewinning contributions.
The Weatherhead East Asian Institute is pleased to announce that the latest issue of its annual student journal The Reed is now available as both a downloadable PDF and in a limited print edition.
The Reed went on hold in 2024 and before that had appeared in a digital-only format for several years. As with its sister publication The APAC Journal, which also returned to print this year, the 2025 Reed demonstrates the Institute’s commitment to presenting student work in the best possible light.
As WEAI Director Lien-Hang T. Nguyen writes in her introduction to the new issue, “This year I’m especially pleased to reintroduce the publication after its hiatus in 2024, even more so because we’ve reconceived it in a format intended to showcase our students’ contributions to best advantage.”
Weatherhead solicits written and visual essay submissions for The Reed from current Columbia graduate and undergraduate students once a year. WEAI staff select one winner and one runner-up in each category; first-place winners receive a $500 prize while runners-up receive $250. All four prizewinners appear in that year’s issue, with the winning visual work featured on the cover.
In the written essay category, this year’s winner is “Solidarity at Namtaeryeong” by Jayin Sihm, a tribute to the South Koreans from widely divergent backgrounds who set aside differences to rally for their common rights after the failed imposition of martial law in December 2024. South Korea is also the focus of runner-up Kaitlyn Jeon’s essay “The Macro in the Micro,” which examines the phenomenon of microorganism compost machines, a high-tech innovation that, in Jeon’s telling, also heralds ominous social and demographic developments.
The striking cover of this year’s Reed is an enlarged view of Echoes of Devotion, a digital painting by Yuhan Zhang ’26 that won in this year’s visual essay category. Zhang took her inspiration from the June 2022 ordination, in Bhutan, of 144 nuns in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Because it marked the first time nuns could access full ordination status in Bhutan, the ceremony was a landmark event in a religious tradition that extends back to the seventh century CE. (The painting appears in full inside the issue.)
The runner-up in the visual essay category is a photography portfolio by Siyang Dai and her collaborator Zijun Zhao that focuses on a modest piece of furniture, the dundun stool, which the residents of a displaced rural community in Henan Province, China, create from found materials. Dai and Zhao posit these humble objects as both a vessel for memory and a subtle form of resistance to the market forces that have upended a traditional way of life.
We thank our 2025 winners for their contributions — along with all of their fellow students who responded to this year’s call for submissions. Watch this space later in the academic year for an announcement about the 2026 edition of The Reed.