Crab Pincer

I follow the Tropic of Cancer westward, photographed while thinking. These thoughts reflected a strong sense of weariness and fatigue toward contemporary life.

Crab Pincer is a series of photographs made during several road trips along the Tropic of Cancer in China. I traveled westward following this marked yet invisible route, photographing as I moved and letting the road hold my attention long enough for certain thoughts to surface—above all, a persistent weariness toward contemporary life.

From the beginning, I did not intend the project to be documentary or research-based. The Tropic is not treated here as a geographical claim, but as a constraint: a line that is unmistakable on maps and strangely absent in lived reality. It offered a stable structure for a personal inquiry, a way to project my recent experience and the changes around me onto specific places and encounters along the route.

In recent years I have increasingly questioned how contemporary life is organized. It does not always arrive as “crisis.” More often it appears as a low-intensity, long-term condition: everything keeps functioning, order remains intact, yet feelings, relationships, and the sense of the future quietly harden and grow brittle. At the same time, many turns carry an inexplicable randomness—like a throw of dice whose outcome we only begin to justify after it has already landed.

The title Crab Pincer grows out of this experience. It names a sustained act of gripping: slowly closing, pausing, and making you aware that you are being held in place. The photographs trace that pressure where it becomes visible—in plantations, smoke and fire, fences and cables, stumps and soil, and in the small, ordinary moments in which people learn to keep going.