The Land of Nowhere
In China in 2025, I have witnessed how time seems to have stalled for certain groups of people. The expansion of modern cities, the rise of the internet, and the forces of globalization appear in their world only as distant and muted echoes.
In this series, I adopt the perspective of a “voyeur,” attempting to lift the veil on these overlooked spaces and look into the lives of those living within historical fractures—their everyday routines, their beliefs, and the fragile thread that connects them to the contemporary world.
On a broader scale, China has become the world’s second-largest economy, and many major cities—such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen—are highly globalized, often indistinguishable from leading cities around the world. Yet beyond these developed urban centers, I still encounter vast rural regions that remain disconnected from mainstream society. These villages are not only distant from global modernization but are also out of step with China’s own developmental pace—a condition that could be described as a kind of “internal Third World.”
Through a slightly voyeuristic approach, I lead viewers into a private interior space. But eventually, I realized that I was not simply peering into a single household; I was catching a glimpse of entire rural communities suspended in time.
In the tides of globalization, these individuals have been left behind, their daily lives inadvertently transformed into something for outsiders to observe. In these places, ways of life remain deeply traditional, still relying on economic structures carried over from earlier eras.
The two people in these photographs are the owners of the house: a man who brings his donkey to offer souvenir photography to visitors, and a woman with a painted face who performs traditional folk rituals. Their work seems to cater to the curiosity of outsiders, yet the more I observed, the more I realized that they are not merely performing the role of people from another era. They truly inhabit this temporal gap—as if walking toward us directly from the past.