THE LAND AFTER PASSAGE

The Land After Passage is a landscape photography project concerned with movement, land, and the traces of human presence. Photographed across different regions of western China—including western Sichuan, Gannan, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia—the project unfolds along roads, wastelands, peripheral spaces, and abandoned man-made sites. The work is inspired by the American photographer Richard Misrach, yet it does not attempt to directly imitate his visual language. Instead, his way of viewing the landscape serves as a point of departure from which I reconsider land, boundaries, and time within the specific context of western China.

In this body of work, landscape is no longer understood merely as natural scenery or geographical space, but as a site continuously rewritten by human activity. Roads, fences, abandoned buildings, industrial remains, and empty stretches of land together create a visual condition of “the aftermath”: people appear to have left, yet their actions, desires, and systems of order remain embedded in the terrain. Through a restrained and detached mode of observation, I seek to reveal how these seemingly silent spaces bear the traces of development, migration, occupation, abandonment, and the passage of time.

The project also emerges from my own experience of looking while travelling. For me, western China is not a distant territory to be romanticised, but a land that is constantly passed through, named, developed, and subsequently forgotten once again. The work attempts to establish a connection between vast geographical landscapes and subtle remnants of human presence. Through photography, I turn my attention towards spaces characterised by marginality, transition, and silence, while asking: when human beings have departed, how does the land continue to preserve the evidence of our existence?

《The Land After Passage》是一组关于移动、土地与人类痕迹的景观摄影项目。项目拍摄于中国西部不同区域，包括川西、甘南、宁夏与内蒙古等地，沿着公路、荒地、边缘空间与被遗弃的人造场所展开。作品受到美国摄影师 Richard Misrach 的启发，但并非对其视觉语言的直接模仿，而是以他的景观观看方式为起点，重新思考中国西部语境中的土地、边界与时间。

在这组作品中，景观不再只是自然风光或地理空间，而是一种被人类活动持续改写的现场。道路、围栏、废弃建筑、工业痕迹与空旷地表共同构成了一种“事件之后”的视觉状态：人似乎已经离开，但其行动、欲望与秩序仍然残留在土地之上。我试图通过冷静、疏离的观看方式，呈现这些看似沉默的空间如何承载开发、迁徙、占有、遗弃与时间流逝的痕迹。

这个项目也来自我自身在路途中的观看经验。对我而言，中国西部并不是一个被浪漫化的远方，而是一片不断被经过、被命名、被开发，也被重新遗忘的土地。作品试图在宏大的地理景观与细微的人类残留之间建立联系，借由摄影去观看那些处于边缘、过渡和沉默之中的空间，并追问：当人类离开之后，土地如何继续保存我们的存在？