Spring Festival Travel Rush

From 2020 to 2024, I photographed the Spring Festival travel rush at Guangzhou Railway Station over five consecutive years. Each year, I returned before the Chinese New Year and selected one specific subject from this vast and complex site of migration.

In 2020, I photographed crowds carrying luggage towards the station. In 2021, I focused on bags and parcels passing through the security scanners, reconstructing their brief appearances through collage. In 2022, I documented passengers resting and waiting in the station’s open-air square. Above them hung a monumental slogan calling for the coordination of regular pandemic control with economic and social development, against which the individual body appeared especially small. In 2023, I photographed a green passenger train standing inside the station. In 2024, I returned to the moving crowds, once again recording people entering the station with their belongings.

The five-year project begins and ends with people in motion. Crowds, luggage, resting areas, and trains represent different components of the Spring Festival transport system: people are directed forward, belongings are inspected and carried, bodies pause temporarily within limited spaces, and trains connect the cities where people work with the homes to which they return.

As Guangzhou Railway Station entered a period of redevelopment and transition towards high-speed rail, I brought this phase of the project to an end. Spring Festival Travel Rush records individual experience within China’s annual mass migration while preserving part of the station’s spatial order and collective memory before its transformation.