Home, Home

After moving from rural southern China to Boston, I explore home and belonging. Through large format photographs and projected family archives, I merge past and present homes across migrant families, revealing how memory and displacement shape belonging.

Home, Home
Since moving from a rural village in southern China to Boston in 2023, I have developed a strong longing for homeland and become attentive to question of the meaning of home. This was my first prolonged separation from my place of origin, both in distance and in time. Because of my studies and work, my place of residence has continued to change, constantly reshaping how I understand home.

The project began with a photographic experiment. After a year of studying art in Boston, I returned to my hometown in Jiangxi with a large format camera to photograph the surrounding landscape where I was raised. I later projected this image into the bedroom of my Boston apartment and photographed the resulting intersections of two homes. In this process, two distinct living environments were brought into a single space, allowing a fluid sense of home to overlap and momentarily coexist.

This experience inspired me to enter my friends’ homes in Boston and its surrounding cities, where I began exploring the migratory histories of different families and how people search for belonging through continual relocation. I collect and scan their old family photographs, then digitally collage or project them into each family’s current living space. These scenes are photographed using a 4×5 large format camera.

As an immigrant city, Boston holds extensive histories of migration and layered cultural exchange. The families I photograph include Chinese girls adopted by American families during the era of the one child policy, young American families who have relocated to major cities for education and work, recent immigrants from Haiti and Russia, and families whose roots trace back to transatlantic migration from Europe. Each household carries a distinct yet interconnected story of displacement and adaptation.

By placing personal domestic histories in dialogue with broader forces of migration, social systems, and historical structures, this project seeks to reveal how memory, displacement, and belonging are continually negotiated across generations and geographies.