YIZHUANG
Personal Project | Hebei China | 2016/2019
My Role
Photography, Concept Development, Exhibition Design, Book Design
Background
Yi Zhuang is a small village of just 2,500 inhabitants in China's Hebei province, where my grandparents spent almost their entire lives — and where I spent nearly every summer and winter break of my childhood, living alongside them. At the end of 2015, while I was studying in Bremen, I received the news that the village would be relocated due to the risk of flooding. A place that held the memories of several generations was about to disappear. This news made me realize that I had to preserve something of Yi Zhuang - for myself, for my family, and for all those who had never known this village.
The Work
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Photography: environmental portraits documenting daily life and the presence of the village's residents
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Interview short film: a 6-minute documentary featuring interviews with elderly residents of the village, conducted in the local dialect
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Photo book: a nude-toned hardcover printed with an image of the "welcoming wall" - the entryway decoration found in every household, inscribed with hopes for a better future. Inside, the text is presented on translucent vellum paper, recounting the history of Yi Zhuang alongside my own memories of growing up there. This book was my final farewell to the village, and a way of sealing its memory.
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Exhibition: shown in Bremen in 2017 and Munich in 2023. The exhibition design was conceived around the idea of "memory and fragments of life" - printed photographs hung in parallel through the center of the space, allowing visitors to walk among them as if wandering the streets of Yi Zhuang, moving at close range through a village that no longer exists.
Creative Process
Between 2016 and 2019, I independently completed this master's graduation project over the course of three years. It comprises four parts: photography, an interview short film, a photo book, and an exhibition.
During the shoot, I lived in the village for a period of time, trying to ease the villagers' unfamiliarity and wariness toward the camera. But staying true to the nature of documentary photography also meant accepting rejection - occasions such as funerals and memorial days were governed by strict customs, making them nearly impossible to photograph. With limited equipment, some shots could only be achieved by climbing onto rooftops.
My photographs are largely environmental portraits - figures set within streets, schools, and homes, woven into the fabric of daily life. They carry both the closeness of someone within the community and the distance of an outside observer, an attempt to capture the overlap between being an insider and an onlooker.
In 2021, Yi Zhuang was demolished. Because of the pandemic, I was unable to document this final stage - my greatest regret. When I later returned to my hometown, all that remained were overgrown fields and faint traces of what had once been there.
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