Hometown家乡系列

“Hometown” is one of the recurring themes in my practice. Most of these works were developed around the Spring Festival, when I repeatedly returned home and reconsidered places that had once felt entirely familiar. For me, hometown is both a specific location and a changing network of relationships, shaped by departure and return, family and land, personal experience and wider social structures.

The series includes The Question of Left-Behind Children, Luxury Hotel, The Second Child’s Second Child, and The Burning Prairie. The Question of Left-Behind Children grew out of a volunteer teaching experience in a rural community and focuses on children growing up while their parents work elsewhere. Luxury Hotel begins with the living spaces of migrant workers in Singapore, examining labour, displacement, and aspirations for a better life. Through family photographs and generational relationships, The Second Child’s Second Child considers the continuing effects of China’s one-child policy on family structure. The Burning Prairie follows the land through cycles of cultivation, burning, dormancy, and renewal.

Although these works were made in different places and concern different groups of people, they are connected by a shared question: how does hometown continue to exist after people leave it? Migration reshapes rural communities and family life; public policy enters intimate relationships; and the land retains traces of time at a slower pace. Returning during the Spring Festival allows me to observe these changes from a position between familiarity and distance.

Within the series, hometown remains in a continuous process of transformation. It is rewritten through departure, absence, new generations, changing uses of land, and inherited memories. Photography becomes a way of tracing these changes and understanding how personal histories intersect with migration, labour, population policy, and rural society.

“家乡”是我长期关注的创作主题之一。大部分作品完成于春节前后，那是我反复返回故乡、重新观察熟悉环境的时间。对我而言，家乡既是一处具体地点，也是一组持续变化的关系：离开与返回，家庭与土地，个人命运与社会结构，都在其中交叠。

这一系列包含《留守孩子的问题》《豪华旅店》《第二个孩子的第二个孩子》《燃烧的原野》等作品。《留守孩子的问题》源于一次乡村支教经历，关注父母外出务工后留在家乡成长的儿童；《豪华旅店》从海外劳工的居住空间出发，讨论迁移、劳动与对更好生活的想象；《第二个孩子的第二个孩子》通过家庭影像与代际关系，观察独生子女政策如何持续影响家庭结构；《燃烧的原野》则记录土地在耕种、燃烧、休眠与再次生长之间的循环。

这些作品发生在不同地点，也涉及不同的人群，但都与“离开家乡之后，家乡如何继续存在”有关。人口流动改变了乡村和家庭的形态，政策进入个人生活，土地则以更缓慢的节奏保存着时间的痕迹。春节期间的返回，使我得以在熟悉与陌生之间重新观看这些变化。

在这一系列中，家乡并非稳定不变的背景。它在人的离开、家庭成员的增加与缺席、土地的使用方式以及代际记忆中持续被改写。摄影成为我理解这些变化的方法，也让我重新辨认个人经验如何与更广泛的迁移、劳动、人口政策和乡土社会联系在一起。