Love letters, Fireworks and Time Travel

This project began with the discovery of 1990s love letters from China. Through photographs in dialogue with these letters, past and present merge into a “love album” that reflects on how words and images capture moments and reshape time.

The work is a record of two years of shooting, and the sense of time brought to me by the time negatives has co-constructed this journey as if it were a time warp. The project consists of photographic images, an exhibition installation, and two different kinds of photo books.

In the summer of 2021, I stumbled upon dozens of love letters exchanged between two individuals residing in Hunan, China, during the 1990s. These letters beautifully capture the mundane aspects of daily life that characterized the intimate relationship between the lovers.
After reading these letters, I decided to use them as a template to recreate and experience the depicted life through their perspective. Using them as inspiration, I embarked on a photography journey, capturing a new set of images reflecting similar cities and paths of activities but set in different historical contexts.
In an attempt to recreate the stories conveyed in these letters, my photographs engage in a visual dialogue with the words penned decades ago. The amalgamation of these vintage love letters and my contemporary images culminates in a new love album. Like the words in letters, photographs encapsulate the fleeting moments of life. From trivial daily records to the emotional states between lovers, the letters are filled with emotions and routines, as if everything is reproduced within myself in a different time and space. This album serves as a form of time travel, seamlessly interweaving diverse individuals and moments across time through the combination of words and images.

Words and images are both records; 1996 and 2023 may not be so far apart. Stagnation or flow—it is all a shuttle, or rather, time is inherently intertwined with infinite imagination.

The photography book has a self-published version from 2023 and a reprinted self-published version from 2025. The two books differ slightly in design, image selection, and editing.