Photography News Report About
My mother was born in Datong, a rural village in Taonan, Jilin. Driven by a tenacity for learning, she became one of the few university graduates of her era to escape the land, eventually settling in the provincial capital, Changchun, where I was born. Growing up, a thin veil always seemed to separate me from this desolate landscape. Only as my senses sharpened over time was I able to truly see the faces and hear the whispers that the wind had almost silenced.
Spanning four generations—from my ninety-year-old grandmother to my young niece—this work captures the invisible traumas and hard-won dignity of the women on this land. For nearly a century, survival has been their recurring motif; for decades, they have mended their precarious lives, stitch by stitch.
Documenting these stories is more than a creative endeavor; it is a necessary act of historical reclamation. As these women find their voices, the textures of their existence—once relegated to the margins—are finally brought into the light.
Ultimately, I hope this work illuminates the lived realities of women in rural China—carving out a corner of the world for their hardships and resilience, their disenfranchisement and reclamation, their silence and outcry, and the endless cycle of splitting and suturing.
However, this modernization comes with a heavy human cost. Rental prices in these once-affordable enclaves have surged by approximately 50%, triggering mass evictions of residents and small businesses alike. This “developmental pain” has ignited unprecedented tension between developers, villagers, and tenants.
Focusing on the villages of Yuanfen, Longqiu, Pingshan, and Aoxia, my work documents a vibrant yet anxious environment where the elderly, children, and young workers coexist amidst the dust of construction. By 2026, my fieldwork has expanded from the initial friction points to Baimang—the epicenter of the 2023 protests—and Baishizhou, once the city’s largest urban village, now a hollowed-out skeleton awaiting a luxury future.
Is this truly an advancement in urban quality, or is it merely a process of “emptying the cage for new birds”? In this “city of dreams,” this project asks: whose dreams are being crafted, and who is being pushed out from the cracks?