The Devil May Watch

In the mountains of Southwest China, belief doesn’t vanish—it adapts. A love song becomes a voice message. A spell moves with the factory shift. This is not tradition preserved, but life lived between ancestral codes and modernity.

The Devil May Watch explores the shifting landscape of belief, ritual, and identity in the marginalized mountain regions of Southwest China. While China’s modernization narrative dominates global discourse, this project shifts the lens toward its overlooked peripheries—not to romanticize folk belief or ritual, but to investigate how they continue to mutate within contemporary systems of migration, labor, and digital technology.

Critical Concerns: Our perspective is rooted in demystification. Rather than viewing traditional beliefs as exotic or mysterious, we approach them as living, evolving cultural practices. These traditions are not fixed in the past, but remain in motion—disrupted, adapted, and reassembled under the pressures of contemporary labor relations, migration, and digital technology.

In these regions, lovers still sing mountain songs to express affection—but now often via instant messaging apps. Factory workers whisper protective spells while operating industrial machinery. When a loved one passes away, people take leave from factory jobs to return home, put on masks, and dance to guide the spirits of the dead.

Process: We have conducted over 3,000 kilometers of fieldwork across Hunan and Guizhou provinces, engaging with local shamans, barefoot doctors, and ritual singers. Along the way, we recorded oral stories, chants, healing practices, and funeral customs. Our focus lies especially on young people who live in-between—between rural and urban, between faith and pragmatism, between ancestral codes and the algorithm-driven popular culture.

The project is still ongoing. It unfolds through photography, video, sound, and text, forming a multi-layered archive of a world not disappearing, but transforming under pressure.

Methodology: This project adopts a slow, embedded approach rooted in mutual listening, long-term engagement, and a refusal to otherize. Rather than positioning ourselves as outsiders documenting the "exotic," we sought moments of shared meaning through sustained presence and reciprocal exchange.