Error Snow

When snow fell on Tanzania, I began to see the skeleton of Africa clearly.

This was a deliberately constructed cognitive dissonance. On top of my original footage shot in Tanzania, I placed a layer of winter snow over the landscape.

In the summer of 2023, during my postgraduate studies in the UK—at a time that was winter in Tanzania—I traveled to Tanzania to meet a female photographer I admired and to follow in her footsteps. At that time, she was traveling across the African continent and had stayed for two weeks at a Chinese seaside temple in Dar es Salaam. Afterward, I also stayed there for two weeks as a volunteer, documenting life in the temple and photographing a series of faces along the nearby coastline.

It was my first time setting foot on the African continent. As an Asian, I did not know much about Africa. I arrived with constructed assumptions about this hot and peripheral place, yet I unexpectedly encountered an exceptionally rare sense of purity and calm social order. Those two weeks felt ethereal and real, like a dream.

I then introduced “snow”—an element that is almost conceptually incompatible with Africa. Through this strong visual contrast, I aimed to challenge entrenched stereotypes. The snow functions like a filter, stripping away surface images long shaped by external perspectives—poverty, disorder, and primordial wildness.

The snow suppresses the restless colors of the tropics and forces the underlying structure to emerge. Under a minimal field of white, the land reveals its original, resilient geographic and spiritual framework.