Mother's Land: 故土

My mother was born in the outskirts of Shanghai, soon fled to Hong Kong with my grandparents, and immigrated to Ohio in hopes of a better life.  Their flight from China left a generational void which I’ve always felt — one of absence and pure wonder. Half my blood was Chinese but I had no idea what that really meant. On a cumulative whim I moved to Shanghai to attempt to learn the language. The country was booming with opportunity and I found a job in sports and brand marketing. Every year in China felt like five years. The work was exhilarating, exhausting, and eventually unfulfilling. My connection with my mother’s land became a complicated one of real love and cultural challenge. I moved back to California, and soon after found photography. I fell head first into the medium, enrolled in art school in San Francisco, which at the time felt like a complete rebirth. Still, my relationship with my mother’s land was incomplete. I desired so deeply to return to China; pictures would often enter my dreams. After art school, I returned to China several times, on mostly one-way tickets over a five year period, stayed with many gracious friends, and got lost with my camera through China’s expanse. The photographs contained in this project are unscripted moments of everyday China that I felt and saw while confronting my own recent past. These are pictures of a world that my family left generations ago and most would never again see. Time moves so quickly, and many moments lived are forgotten. In China time moves uniquely, violently fast. My own early time there seemed to evaporate. Photographs do have that chance to endure, as a form of evidence, of time and place, bringing me closer to an appreciation of the wonder and an acceptance of the absence.