The IAPLC has grown from 557 entries representing 19 countries in 2001. Sim has won the IAPLC’s top award twice, a feat that only one other aquascaper has ever accomplished in the contest’s 21-year history.
For many contestants, taking home the IAPLC purse-¥1 million (€7,600) for the best in show, ¥10,000 to ¥300,000 (€77 to €2,300) for the others-is secondary to having the Grand Prize title bestowed on their work. It’s the World Cup of planted aquariums, the oldest and most prestigious of what has become a global circuit of competitions. They live for the friendly rivalry and the camaraderie of their tribe.įor the members of this tribe, nothing is more important than the International Aquatic Plants Layout Contest (IAPLC) in Japan. They’re obsessives who spend weeks on a concept and months on the execution: arranging and rearranging and gluing stones and pieces of wood, tying bits of moss into place, using tweezers to insert plants into the soil, waiting for stems and leaves to sprout and selecting a few fish from among hundreds of different types to bring the tank to life. They’re architects and painters and engineers and marketers. Some have opened stores or gone into business making high-end aquariums worth tens of thousands of euros for businesses and wealthy families from Budapest to Hong Kong.Īquascapers are a motley bunch. Mixing aquaculture, Japanese gardening, chemistry, and photography, these aquarium enthusiasts make art that is an homage to the sublime unpredictability of the living world. He belongs to a global community of hobbyists who design and build elaborate underwater habitats so chemically-balanced and teeming with microorganisms that even the fish might be fooled into believing that their surroundings are the work of evolutionary forces. Sim is one of the world’s most decorated creators of nature aquariums. It’s the most stressful part of this hobby,” he says. “I love photography, but I hate taking photos of my aquarium. He needs them to position themselves so they accentuate the watery world they inhabit, so their small bodies add to the illusion of something too grand-say, a vine-tangled, old-growth forest in Congo-to have been made by Sim at his home in Johor Bahru, Malaysia.īy then, Sim, a 47-year-old chemical engineer at a German multinational, will have spent the equivalent of several thousand euros and more than half the year preparing his 1.2-meter-long tank for the decisive moment. Everything depends “on the cooperation of the fish,” according to Sim. He could end up with 900 photos-it’s happened before. But it’s just as likely to drag on for days. If he’s lucky, it might take him a couple of hours to finish. Ideally, the vegetation will appear robust and voluminous yet not too overgrown that it detracts from the interplay of light and shadows on the driftwood-and-stone backdrop.
The subject of the shoot: a 300-liter fish tank with a thriving freshwater ecosystem of plants and mosses, iridescent fish, tiny snails, and algae-chomping shrimp. Sometime before the end of May 2022, Josh Sim will set up a camera on a tripod, shut off the lights, and convert his living room into a makeshift photo studio.
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