I was born in a small city in central China called Taiyuan, population four million ironically, and one of those rust-belt cities that fell out of relevance after the industrialization under the country’s communist past. The Great Plains, as directly it is translated, lies in the intersection of the “barren west” and the central plain. Maybe that is why I ended up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a place with equally wintry December, heart-warming hospitality, and a vastness only a Midwesterner can truly understand.

I grew up taking pictures of my family with my dad’s old cameras. The generational affinity for dials and gears that capture the flow of time had been passed down, from my grandpa’s watch repair store to my father’s camera cave. Time’s arrow neither stands still nor reverses, it merely marches forward. The joy of wielding my own mechanical wand and the enthrallment with photography’s ability to capture the ephemeral-just as crochets and quavers of on a music sheet crystalizes the sounds that once were-are vivid and ingrained in my core memory.

Studying abroad from an early age meant excitement, and novelty but also a blurry concept of home. As the years rolled on, the place that I was raised in slowly faded away into a remote continent and distant time while the new places I moved into still felt concrete and contrived. The smaller town values such as kindness, innocence, and warmth, I was used to growing up, looked increasingly like ignorance, obedience, and bigotry. While I was increasingly drawn to an urban experience-living in Shanghai with my partner during the pandemic and moving to Chicago after graduating from college-in big cities, division and atomization seemed to always triumph over conversations and connections. There still hasn’t been anywhere I can truly attach to and call home.

Along the way, I picked up my dad’s cameras and did what was the most: see, feel, press the shutter and repeat. The ease I find with observing the world through a lens and within frame, luckily, has never been lost. I don’t think I take photos to escape. Rather, I reframe reality so that I can live in it. Through my work, I aim to capture the absurdity of urban life and glimpses of nature wherein that seem the antidotes. I take photos of what’s in the dark, and on the outskirt, the sublime, the uncanny, joy, sorrow, fleeting belonging, and all-consuming emptiness. I look at the empty spaces in between the objects, listen to what is unsaid, and read what is unwritten. The same way dark matter makes up the majority of the universe, the yin seems to often carry more weights and information than the yang. I can’t help but wonder, if we would just pause for a moment amidst the hustles and bustles of metropolis, what stories previously untold would be revealed? What forgotten voices and melodies might resonate from a long gone dream?

In today’s world where alienation is running rampant, photography’s magical power to bring harmony and peace through revelation and reimagination is needed more than ever. The tension between the reality and expectations, mundaneness and ideals, is uncomfortable but we, are in this together. Maybe contradiction, oddness and eeriness are the ultimate universal experience. Ego may try to divide us with judgments and fear, but nothing can take away the fact that we are just human beings figuring ourselves out.

A haiku of an unknown poet has been an earworm to me for a while:

人世皆攘攘
(Human affairs are transient)

樱花默然转瞬逝 (cherry blossoms withering on the side)

相对唯顷刻 (we see each other only now)

To me, it means the secret ingredients to finding a home is to embrace the paradoxes, live at the moment, and find meaning to what seems to be nothingness, to what is.