Wild Flowers by the Rock
This series is a long-term auto-ethnographic exploration that seeks insight into the mundane pursuit of both tangible and intangible truths within the contemporary Chinese suburban landscape. Drawing from the Romantic idea of the sublime, my work examines the tensions between human presence and the vastness of urbanised nature, between personal solitude and collective life.
The suburbs serve as a means for me to understand what it means to exist in the modern world. In these liminal spaces between city and countryside, I observe a peculiar sense of the sublime: not the dramatic mountains and stormy seas of Romantic painting, but rather the quiet power of everyday landscapes that both shelter and alienate their inhabitants. Like the solitary figures in Romantic landscapes who stand contemplating vast nature, my subjects exist in a state of perpetual tension, caught between the warmth of home and the inevitable fate of isolation.
My photographic journey is essentially an exploration of self-portraiture, though in its most abstract form. I envisage myself within these landscapes, embodying the rituals and routines of those who inhabit them, endeavouring to evoke what the Romantics referred to as "pathetic fallacy", the projection of personal feelings onto the external world. Through this approach, the landscape becomes more than mere documentation; it evolves into a mirror reflecting the inner nature of modern urban life.
In these suburban tableaux, I capture moments where human vulnerability meets the indifferent persistence of place, where wildflowers grow defiantly by rocks, and where individuals carve out meaning in standardised environments. This work oscillates between pleasure and displeasure, between the beauty of human resilience and the melancholy of modern disconnection. It is an attempt to reveal, through careful observation and subjective expression, the authentic patterns of human nature as they manifest in our urbanised world—a search for truth in both the material landscape and the spiritual condition of those who inhabit it.
2013 - 2018 / All works are pigment ink prints on rag paper.
