As Night Moves Through the Valley

As Night Moves Through the Valley examines the gradual transformation of Kazakh pastoral life in Xinjiang, as nomadic traditions shift toward settlement under the pressures of urbanization, tourism, and broader socio-political change.

This is an ongoing project that explores the condition of Kazakh and other ethnic minority communities in China within the context of urbanization. It began both from a curiosity about the relationship between Han Chinese and minority communities, and from an awareness of my own distance. Growing up in an urban Han context, my understanding of minority cultures was limited and often shaped by mediated images and forms of cultural consumption.

Living with a Kazakh nomadic family in Qiongkushitai, a small village in Xinjiang. I began to encounter a way of life that both challenged and unsettled these assumptions.

The family I stayed with has practiced pastoralism for generations. In recent years, like many others in the village, they have begun to move between two distinct modes of life: seasonal herding in the mountains and settled living in the nearby county town. Through their experience, I observed an ongoing negotiation between mobility and stability, tradition and adaptation. The older generation, who speak only Kazakh, remain committed to herding, while the younger generation, who’s been educated in Mandarin and exposed to urban life through TikTok and Han’s tourists, seek alternative livelihoods in tourism, service industries, or migration to cities.

Moving between remote grazing areas and the county town, the work traces this transformation through everyday details: guesthouses built beside former sheep pens, remnants of yurts constructed for tourists, and the worn skin of horses marked by the physical demands of herding and migration from day to night. Alongside the conveniences brought by settlement, new forms of precarity emerge, debt, unfamiliar financial systems, and unequal access to healthcare and education. These conditions take on forms that were either absent or fundamentally different within earlier nomadic life.