Veiled by the Cloud and Mist








My mother is a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner who once learned herbal healing from Miao doctors in the mountains of Guizhou. By following her, I gradually entered a medical world that treats body, spirit, and environment as one. Miao medicine is a holistic system that grows from the land and from long experience with illness, herbs, and people. In many villages in Qiandongnan, where access to modern healthcare is limited, Miao doctors remain the ones people turn to when other options have been exhausted. Their knowledge is passed on through apprenticeship and daily practice rather than formal training or certification, relying on plants gathered from the mountains, close attention to the body, and relationships of trust built over time between doctor and patient. As the environment changes and younger people leave to work elsewhere, this system is becoming fragile. Within the language of modern medicine, it is often described as backward and gradually pushed to the margins of public life.

Since 2022, I have been returning to these mountain communities to follow the doctors in their work and to photograph how healing takes shape within relationships. This project grows from a wish to understand what their care means in the lives of the people who depend on it, and why it remains essential even when it is rarely mentioned in public accounts of medicine. Working with photography keeps me close to the world my mother once entered and allows me to keep learning from a practice that ties care to daily life and to the land. Through this project, I try to stay beside this work as it continues today and to keep a record of what survives, even as the conditions around it become more uncertain.