1

I still remember that winter break ten years ago. I had saved up some money and had the sudden idea to buy a camera. I asked a friend who took photos to help me pick one. I mentioned the Nikon D750, and he said I'd be better off with a mirrorless, lighter and cheaper, more suited for a girl, and easy to let go of if I ever lost interest. That's when my stubborn streak kicked in. "No," I said. "I'm getting the D750." And I've been stubborn about it ever since. Every single day, never once setting it down. Photography has long stopped being a bulky machine I carry around. It has become my life.

I bought a thick introductory book on photography from a secondhand bookstore and hit the road after skimming a few pages. I practiced by photographing people around me, copying shots I'd seen on social media. Then one day I wandered into the Lighthouse Café on campus with my camera. The place had just been renovated, warm and bright. I asked if I could take some photos, and the owner said yes. As I was leaving, he looked at my camera and asked if I'd be interested in a part-time job. I said yes.

Lighthouse. It became the name of my online platform, and the origin of everything.

The owners were just a few years out of university, so photographing there felt like play. I was technically there to take photos and write for their account, but really I spent my days photographing friends, capturing moments that made us laugh. That was the first real connection I built with the world through photography, the thing that brought me to people I loved being around and showed me that relationships could feel like this. I had always been reserved and shy, someone who couldn't even bring herself to say hello to a stranger, let alone walk up and introduce herself.

It guided me to places far and wide. I threw myself into every moment, seeing only what was right in front of me, and I had never felt the world so close. Along the way, I was lucky — I met with more kindness from strangers than I could have expected.

The first time I went to Shanghai, I met an elderly Japanese man at the hostel. He said Nikon was a fine camera. I nodded. He asked what I was planning to do, and I said I was just going to wander around. He asked if he could join me, and I said yes. So the two of us set off, communicating in broken English and through photography, stopping here and there to take pictures. We ate wontons together in silence, and he treated me to coffee at one of those fashionable little cafés. The next day he was heading back to Japan, and I walked him to the subway station. He shook my hand with great solemnity and told me to come visit him in Fukuoka someday. It all seems so ordinary in the telling. So why do I remember every detail so clearly?

Later I went to Nanji Island, a small and little-known island that required a high-speed train to Ruian and then a boat. Before boarding, I stopped at a random little place near the station to eat. I had never had day lily noodles like that before, clean and full-bodied, exactly right for a morning. Halfway through my bowl, an old woman shuffled in muttering to herself and sat down across from me. The owner hurried over, spoke to her gently, guided her to a table in the back and brought her a bowl of soup. Then she turned to me and said, she's not quite right in the head, she wanders around here a lot, sorry about that. I said it was fine, and left carrying a feeling I couldn't quite name.

On the island one evening, I had my tripod set up on a dim street when a woman's voice came toward me: my goodness, what are you doing here, a young girl all by herself. I said the sea looked beautiful and I wanted to photograph it. She asked where I was from and what I was doing there, then said, the sea from here is nothing special, why don't you go out on the water to shoot? I told her I'd seen the sign — three thousand yuan for a boat trip. She said, yes, that's quite steep. Then, with sudden enthusiasm, she asked if I'd be interested in coming out on her boat to photograph her large yellow croaker fish for promotional material. I agreed without thinking. We settled on a time and place to meet. On the way back to my room I kept thinking, what if she's going to murder me — but I showed up the next day anyway, right on time.

Out on the water the sun was fierce, the lens almost flaring out completely. It was the first time I understood that weather, environment, temperature — all of it lives inside a photograph. That blazing, crystalline light, I don't think it has ever come back. Afterward she invited me to her home for a meal of large yellow croaker. She told me her fish had been supplied to the G20 summit, two thousand yuan a piece. I ate until I couldn't move. The taste I no longer remember. She asked me to stay the night. The thing about me is, I trust my instincts blindly, for no particular reason. I felt safe, so I lay down and slept soundly. When I left the next morning she packed up grapes she had grown herself, tucked bottles of water into my bag, and walked me to the dock. She said, I hope when my little girl grows up and goes out into the world, people are this good to her.

Out to sea on a stranger's boat. Mom, don't ask.

Too many things have been remembered alongside the photographs. The guesthouse owner who refused to let me pay for five days of meals. The old man on the train who pressed a whole bag of fresh apricots into my hands and walked away without looking back. Looking back now, I think all that kindness shaped the way I feel about photography and what I believe it can do.

Go out, be among people, good things happen, good people appear.

2

Is there a moment, I wonder, when you know what you will do with your whole life, some sudden pull that arrives before you can explain it?

Around that time I spent about two months without touching my camera, buried in exam preparation. When it was finally over I went hiking, camera in hand again at last. Picking it up after all that time, it felt heavier than I remembered, my arm tiring quickly just from holding it up. Walking through the hills, I spotted a tree, pulled out my camera, started shooting. I was just happy to be doing it again. And then, almost in the same instant, tears. My mind hadn't even caught up yet, too busy being surprised. An unremarkable moment in an ordinary life. And yet I felt embarrassed, and I knew, at the same time, that I would never put it down again.

From that point on my life began to bend around photography. Before that I had wanted nothing more than to write, or to work as an editor, anything connected to literature. Over the years I've been asked many times why I made the switch, and I have a ready answer: because literature is something you make alone behind closed doors, while photography creates connection and demands action. That's true, as far as it goes. But it's an answer shaped for easy understanding, not the whole truth. The real version is far less rational. My body moved first and language came after. My body had already decided: I've chosen this path, get ready. And my mind, still lacing up its shoes: fine, fine, I'll catch up.

If I wanted to keep doing what I loved, I had to make it a career. Loving something as a hobby was no longer enough to hold it. So I started looking into possibilities, watching videos online from people who had gone down different paths.

If I wanted to keep doing what I loved, I had to make it a career. Loving something as a hobby was no longer enough to hold it. So I started looking into possibilities, watching videos online from people who had gone down different paths.

The first thing I considered was photojournalism. It seemed to fit, aligned with something I believed in simply and without much sophistication: see the problem, help people. I interned at a newspaper. Four months later I crossed it off. Most of that time was spent photographing officials giving speeches. I couldn't see the point. I learned early to grab a few usable shots at the start and spend the rest of the time pressing the shutter into empty air.

Next came portrait photography, the path I stayed on the longest. Those polished, stylized images were genuinely seductive, and the ability to find an angle that made both person and place beautiful seemed like a real skill worth having. I photographed everyone I could find, friends, classmates, strangers from the internet. Eventually people started seeking me out, I made some money, and by the end I was planning and shooting my entire graduating class's portraits. But for someone introverted and prone to wearing herself down from the inside, it was exhausting in a way that had nothing to do with the hours. Relationships built on transaction come with a distance you can't cross no matter how good the photos turn out. Every preference, every request, every passing comment landed somewhere tender. Most clients were friendly and satisfied, but I still had to tuck myself away each time, let only the craft run, keep the whole thing moving. I hadn't learned to separate judgment of the work from judgment of myself. I still haven't, if I'm honest. I care about photography too much, I've tied myself to it too completely. When someone responds to the work, they're responding to me. I kept at it anyway, for the money.

My first ever paid gig. Thank you Xiaoyun!
Ten years and counting.

On top of all this I was shooting for factories, for influencer events, for conferences and lectures and corporate gatherings of every kind. Every time I came home I felt like I had been beaten.

Then I landed an internship at a photography arts institution, working in the photography department. I genuinely thought I had found the right path. A place that believed in photography, where I could shoot and talk directly with the artists putting up shows, where even covering an event or a meeting might feel like something.

That idea didn't survive three months.

One assignment was to document the schedule of a French artist visiting China for the first time to mount a retrospective. He was also doing some local work at the invitation of the institution. The night before I couldn't sleep, too excited. I was going to watch a master choose his angles, see how he looked at the world! In the morning I arrived to find him already there, a gentle old man who photographed me first and said I reminded him of himself when he was young, a kid clutching a big camera. I followed him through the streets, he made work, I photographed him making it, and the supervisor kept pushing me to shoot more of him making it. When the material went out, my name wasn't on it, nor was my fellow intern's. The supervisor called to tell me not to be discouraged. "He is a famous person," she said. "What you did was record history. It has great significance."

The next morning I tried to scrub the sole of my shoe. I had stepped in dog shit in one of the old buildings, and the smell in the basin was overwhelming. The tread was too deep, the brush couldn't reach the grooves, and I couldn't get it clean no matter how long I scrubbed. Eventually I threw the shoe away. I had liked that pair. I'd had them for two years.

3

I thought about the spreadsheet I had made when researching schools. The top half was full of photography programs, but I had no formal training and no idea how to apply to an art school. I asked some friends in architecture about arts applications and they pointed me toward portfolio agencies. I contacted two. The cheapest program cost twenty to thirty thousand yuan. I dropped it. After everything I had been through, I didn't want to go back to work either. I wanted more time to figure out what photography could be for me. I still loved literature. I couldn't choose. After going back and forth for a long time, I applied to the literary publishing program at Fudan University, one of the most competitive universities in China. The campus is in Shanghai, the best city in the country for photography. Still within the Chinese department but lighter than a research degree, which meant I could sit in on other classes without the coursework. And besides, who's to say photography publishing isn't publishing? So I put the camera away, bought the textbooks and exam materials, and spent the better part of a year preparing, leaving early and coming home late. I got in. I'm glad I did. That was how my unofficial education in art photography finally began.

Two months into the semester I reached out to Imageless, a photography book studio, whose founder, my mentor Ni, had just relocated from Wuxi to Shanghai. We met at a café, talked for a while, and by the end of the day had settled on an internship and an apprenticeship. I paid him tuition, he paid me a wage, and somehow we were even. That lasted two years.

Finding someone to properly learn photography from, I was overjoyed. I felt like I had finally arrived somewhere. What I hadn't expected was that after all that distance, I had only arrived at a starting point. Ni had extraordinarily high standards. Work without thought behind it wouldn't do. Work that was only formally beautiful wouldn't do. Work where the form and content didn't speak to each other still wouldn't do. Everything I thought I knew about photography was dismantled. I had to begin again from nothing.

For the better part of the first year I was deep in self-doubt. Photos I thought were good, he said weren't. Photos he said were good, I could sense something in, vaguely, but every time I thought I was close to understanding, he would bring in a new photobook and wash away whatever I had just started to build. Once he forwarded me someone's work on WeChat with no comment at all. I stared at the photos, lost, chest tight, my head filling with voices, his, mine, fragments from photobooks I had read. My honest first reaction was that I didn't like the work, that it was nothing but accumulated symbols. But I had been wrong so many times that I assumed he must be recommending it, so I talked myself into looking again, convinced there was something I was missing, and read through the introduction several more times. I spent the entire afternoon on it. I still didn't like it. Eventually I gave up and wrote back: I don't really understand this work, and I don't think I like it. He replied almost immediately: Good, you're not supposed to understand it. It's terrible. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Something in me went slack all at once. My mind dissolved.

Ni, at work.

But that relentless refinement did shape the way I approach photography. You can't substitute another medium, can't reconstruct a scene, can't fix it in post, can't hide behind black and white. If you didn't capture it, you didn't capture it, and the only thing left to do is keep going. This wasn't about the decisive moment — the methods were open, the shooting was free — just no faking it. Photography is an honest medium. Photography sees through you. Trying to disguise that you didn't give everything is always futile, so every photograph has to be genuine. Even when the answer was almost always "think more, try again," I kept at it happily, because I had learned an entirely new way of perceiving the world. Taking photographs was how I kept checking that I still could.

Photography acts directly on reality. When your understanding of the medium shifts, when your perspective expands, the way you experience the world shifts with it. In the beginning I was preoccupied with formal beauty, but Teacher Ni kept pointing to the emptiness of the content, pushing me to learn to extract and read visual information rather than visual beauty. The dimensions through which I saw the world changed. Details I had always dismissed, cluttered scenes, an ordinary tabletop, all became things I could connect with and feel. The world was released from the constraint of only looking for beauty, and it opened up, became wider and deeper. After that I no longer needed the camera to find my way in. Photography had grown into my eyes.

The way I perceived things had changed, and the way I looked at people began to change with it.

Around that time a friend and I made a monthly agreement to each respond to a theme using our own medium, painting, photography, writing. The second theme was a single word: red. I immediately thought of my roommate, who loved red and talked about it often. That became the moment I started photographing real people. If not beauty, then what?

I looked at the work of many photographers known for their images of people, Nan Goldin, Rineke Dijkstra, Alec Soth. In the end I found what I was looking for in a book made by Wolfgang Tillmans' assistant, a quiet, understated visual language that felt like the emotional register most Chinese people actually live in. The portraits in the book showed no dramatic feeling, no physical intensity, just an ordinary person absorbed in some private moment, or registering some small reaction to the world outside. Wolfgang had photographed his assistant Conor Donlon for fifteen years and made a book in his name. The book is not widely known, but it moved me deeply. It seemed to be saying: a life this quiet, a person this ordinary, someone whose name almost no one knows, still deserves to be seen and understood, slowly and at length. There is more tenderness in that kind of steady attention than in any dramatic gesture. I photographed my roommate in the same spirit. At first there was awkwardness between us, but after a while we both forgot the camera was there. What remained were the moments of laughter, of silence, of tears, all of it sharpened, all of it becoming part of a life we had shared, and would keep echoing.

(Xiaohe, Xiaohe! 小何，小何！)

Because of her trust, I found that quality on my very first attempt at photographing someone. A moment that belonged to her soul, a moment in which I could see her dignity. Not the dignity of someone holding themselves upright, but the dignity of a person who is, in that instant, completely herself. No performance, no accommodation, no holding back. Just her. That kind of moment is fleeting. With enough experience you might learn to sense it quickly, to draw it out, but as a beginner, if you haven't waited long enough or don't know the person well enough, you can only sift through photograph after photograph hoping to find a trace of it. Having once witnessed something like that, how could I let go of the search. I could no longer photograph people and stay only at the surface. So I kept going, one person at a time, drawing closer to each one, seeing each one, becoming friends with each one.

4

"Failures in photographing people kept sending me back to think through what had gone wrong. I was frustrated, because there were so many rejections, so many moments of losing the thread. I was stuck here for a long time, going nowhere. I didn't want to take aggressively, and I didn't want to photograph something that was only fooling myself. Maybe if I weren't so knotted up inside things would have shifted. But I was also someone who found it hard to approach people in the first place. One rejection and I'd be swearing my way out the door, let alone taking another step forward. The stuckness was strange. All I had wanted was to document people, and it seemed like such a simple matter of whether someone was willing or not. But it turned out that 'willing' was far more complicated than I had imagined, shaped by who I was and who they were. I woke up in the middle of the night unable to sleep, turning this over and over. A thousand things to say, and all that came out was: fuck."

I wrote this a year after photographing my roommate.

People are probably the most complex things in the world. It's hard to hold a single attitude toward everyone, which means it's equally hard to photograph different people in a single way. People are approachable, and just as easily not. Failure, hitting walls. These should feel like part of the territory. But I was still stuck inside it, grinding away at something that wouldn't move.

This stalemate went on for a long time. Somehow the people I saw every day felt increasingly far away. One friend in particular was someone emotionally guarded. I could see him, but I couldn't photograph him. Whether he'd let me depended entirely on his mood. I respected that, never pushed. Then one day we were all together, loose and laughing, and in the middle of it he turned me down again, lightly, as a joke. It was a completely ordinary moment, the same as always between us. But something in me collapsed. I wanted to yell. I don't understand relationships, I don't know what the right thing is, I just can't bear to let these moments go, is that not allowed, is that too much to ask? I knew it was his freedom. I just couldn't hold it anymore. I went home and cried until I had nothing left. I was sure I would never again find that kind of moment.

My first real photography project. I met so many people at Ale Garden. Now it's gone.

The setbacks kept coming on the documentary side too. I hadn't set out to commit to anything in particular. From the beginning I was simply drawn to reality and to people, and if you walk in that direction you're not going to end up in New Topographics or conceptual photography. That leaves documentary. That's just where the path goes.

I went back to the mountains of Yunnan. The first time had been two years earlier, when my roommate came to Miaoba to research rural education for her thesis and I came along. Now I felt the photographs weren't enough, and I came back.

Miaoba is a very small town. Getting there from home meant a high-speed train to Zhenxiong, then a minivan that waited for enough bodies before it would move, stopping along the way to drop passengers at other villages, handing me off to a second driver, waiting again for a full car before finally arriving. I usually left at seven in the morning and reached the town by eight or nine at night.

The mountains were full of rain and cloud. I photographed between gaps in the weather. The school had its own schedule and rules, and most of the time all I could do was wait.

The first week it rained without stopping. I photographed almost nothing. The old principal's wife ran a guesthouse, and I sat inside with nothing to do, opening the window each morning to fog and rain. Then something came up at home and I had to leave.

I went back a week later. The weather cleared and I finally got the photographs I had come for. And then, having got them, I suddenly didn't know what to do with myself. All that time before, unable to finish shooting, mouth ulcers spreading one after another, no sleep, holding together a stomach that kept threatening to give out, sitting in dim guesthouses spending money for nothing. I went back to my room and sobbed. I didn't know why I was doing any of this. I couldn't change anything. I was nobody. What right did I have to talk about fairness and justice.

Maybe if I stood higher, went further, the lives and grief I carried would be seen by more people. Or maybe not. Maybe by then time would have moved on, and they would no longer need anyone to answer for them.

Those photographs are still on my hard drive. I can't bring myself to open them. The moment I see those images I'm back inside the minivan, that thick, airless smell of sweat pressing into my face, no way out.

I had been sinking for too long with nothing coming back, and I became raw and irritable toward everything to do with photography. Was documentary photography a dead end, or was I the dead end? I didn't know. But when I turned to look at photography without people, medium, concept, research, it felt no different to me than photojournalism, portrait shoots, event coverage. I stood in photography book fairs in Shanghai, struggling, flipping through one book with no people, then another with no people, then another. No people. "Where are the people? The living, concrete people?"

I wanted to scream: can an artist care only about issues and remain blind to the people around them? Can they see the conditions people live in and feel nothing, do nothing?

And at the same time, the one friend I had in photography and I went our separate ways. We understood documentary completely differently. He saw it as a mode of making work, even an aesthetic. I disagreed. If photography doesn't engage with reality, I said, it has no meaning. That's the responsibility of the medium. I argued with him. He accused me of trying to force my ideas onto him. And I knew there was nothing left to say.

After leaving Shanghai I went home and decided to apply to the Photography and Society program at KABK. I wanted an answer. And if there was no answer, at least there would be people walking the same road. That felt like more than I had now.

I gathered everything I had shot over the years, put together a portfolio, wrote the statements, and sent it off.

Life went on as usual. Watching television, eating meals, walking with my grandmother in the evenings. She said: "The day you got the interview notification, you were completely out of it. Just sat there at dinner like you weren't there." I remembered that afternoon, opening the email and finding out I'd made it to the interview stage, my body starting to shake, in waves, and I couldn't stop it. Everything I had been holding onto, every possible way forward, had compressed itself into this one thing.

Then came the rejection. Smoothly.

Where was I supposed to go? I didn't know. I only knew that in this life, I would never have another chance to study photography.

5

My first camera was a heavy old thing, solid and ungainly. For a long time I carried it every day. I still have a small, thick callus on my right hand, where I used to support it from below.

After coming to the Netherlands I rarely picked up the camera at all. I just sat and thought. There was so much here that was new, an overwhelming flood of images, video, installation, sculpture, multi-media interaction, every possible way of playing with art. And so I had no choice but to ask myself what photography was, and why it was still photography for me.

Adrift and alone, grasping at something I couldn't name, I took all the confusion I had carried for years, everything I had wanted to scream, and sent it in an email to a distinguished figure I had never met, somewhere far away.

He replied the next morning and invited me to talk online. I told him I felt like I was exploiting the people I photographed. I could see the problems they lived inside and all I could do was take pictures. It was painful. Sometimes I even wondered whether not photographing at all was the right thing to do. He asked me: "Why should someone who makes the effort to care feel more guilty than someone who doesn't care at all?" I didn't know what to say. Then he said: ethics isn't about being nice. It's about being a warrior. We should stay inside the situation, face it, negotiate, adjust as we go. Don't withdraw just to avoid discomfort. Doing nothing is not neutral. When people are suffering, when no one is paying attention, refusing to look is not ethics. It's abandonment.

I had nothing to say. That night in the mountains, crying and asking myself what right I had to any of this, felt very far away.

In August last year I received an email telling me I had been selected for a photography residency in Brioude, France. It was time to pick up the camera and go. Brioude is a small town in the mountains of central France. I knew this kind of journey well: a flight, then several long swaying trains into a sparsely populated hill region. I was nervous. I kept imagining the organizers as cold, suited elites.

They turned out to be three cheerful old men and two women who moved like they were always in a hurry. They took me eating and drinking, from cafés to their homes, arranged excursions for me, hiking, the river, a church. They fussed over me the way grandparents back home would, worrying about whether the guesthouse had towels and bedding, making sure everything was ready in advance, passing me eggs and jam. When language failed us we typed into a translation app and waited, one sentence at a time, then looked up and smiled. Time moved slowly.

The old woman who spoke English became my translator. She was always pointing at me and introducing me to people with great pride: "This is our artist in residence this year!" The town had a large contemporary art museum. She took me to visit, and the director did turn out to be the suited type, but that didn't stop her. She marched straight up and introduced me to him anyway, which made me feel like somebody. She was seventy-five, full of energy, always joking. I told her: "It's getting cold, make sure you keep warm." She said: "Yes! mama."

They liked to tease me: "You're famous in Brioude now. How does it feel?" It was embarrassing in the best way. I asked them why they had chosen me. They said: "Because in your work we can see the effort you make to connect with people." It was the first time in all that time that I had heard someone say out loud that they recognized what I was trying to do.

My solo exhibition opened shortly after. Three bodies of work from Guizhou. The curator didn't change a word of the content, only helped me think through how to present it. He said every part had weight.

The guestbook filled up. Someone thanked me for taking these photographs and called it a spiritual journey away from modernity, a return to rural roots. Someone else said the work was deeply moving, that it evoked something essential about being human in a poetic way. Others told me to keep doing what I loved, not to give up, that they hoped I would succeed.

The work at the residency was no different from everything I had done before. Get close to people, talk, photograph, get fed. The villagers were warm without exception. Wherever I went to shoot I was chased down and fed. Nadine fed me most of all. She was a photographer too, open and quick to laugh, and like my mother she loved puttering around the mountains in a beat-up little car. She kept many animals, cats, dogs, a horse, chickens, bees, all of them thriving. She always said: "Yixi, you are so nice." I asked her where she got that from. I was just eating my way through her house. She said: "I can feel."

One day Nadine took me to see her old horse, a white gentle thing, folded down onto the ground. Nadine cupped its face in her hands and kissed it. I asked if I could take a photo. She said of course, isn't that what you're here for?

Isn't that what you're here for? In that instant something opened up. Why still photography? Because photography had long since stopped being a choice of medium. It was the way I lived. Go out. Be with people.

That is all.