Looking Back at Home

My hometown is a village in Putian, Fujian. Growing up, I was surrounded by women — my grandmother, my great-grandmother, my mother, and many others who chose to stay. They tended to the family, maintained the rhythms of daily life, and held the entire structure of living together with their bodies and time. Their love and care were the conditions that made it possible for me to leave. After leaving, I gradually came to understand that home is not a place one can simply return to and resettle within. The land is still there. The people I love still live within it. But something that once made belonging possible has quietly come loose. The inability to go back is not an emotional rupture — it is a slow displacement. Changes in ways of living, in the rhythms of labor, and in the bonds between generations have gradually dismantled the very conditions on which return depends. Looking Back at Home does not seek to reconstruct a complete image of home. Instead, through photography and the assemblage of memory, the work repositions fragments of impressions that are blurred, fractured, and gradually fading. Each memory carries its own time and space; they resist being assembled into a coherent narrative, yet through slow connections, continue to point toward the same question: when return is no longer possible, how do attachments to land, family, and intergenerational relationships persist? And in what forms might love, responsibility, and memory find a way to be kept?