Inner Landscape

I am a Los Angeles based photographer and visual artist from China. My creative practice focuses on conceptual and documentary projects at the intersection of humans, space, and culture.

Growing up with Chinese ink landscape paintings has shaped my work with a poetic approach as Chinese depictions of nature are abstract expressions of the mind and heart of the individual artist. We do not merely venture into the landscape, we carry it forth within us.

Inner Landscape is a long-term conceptual series visually reflecting the inward world. Our inner landscape is more than an imagined space, it’s a basis of thoughts and who we are. How we define concepts like home, safety, community, and comfort depend on how we visualize those concepts in our mind. As a female artist, my goal is to understand how women's identities engage with a particular site, and more broadly, the land itself through psychological perspectives. Each photograph begins with hours of hiking and location search, looking for shapes, lines, harmonious or discordant colors, and diagrammatic aspects in the wild to reflect the inner world. Through these investigations both internally and externally, I have come to understand that the female relationship with landscape contains rich layers of characteristics.

Each photograph points to the metaphorical internal sense of the female self. These long exposures of light sources refer to the enduring, bursting division, and momentum within the female, while the pastel and contrasting subjects tell the complex stories of emotions. These works demonstrate the paradox of the female relationship with self, calling attention to the dichotomy of resilience and fragility in the process of looking inwards.