The flowing river never stops

Since 2022, I have photographed life along Japan’s Tama River. Returning to Shanghai in 2024, I found the Suzhou River near my family home transformed. Though divided by space and culture, the two rivers merge in my experience: people change, life goes on

The river flows constantly, and time never stops. Flowers fall and grass withers. Students graduate, lovers part, dogs grow old, and musical instruments gather dust. Unknowingly, we become familiar with the river, and unknowingly, we leave it behind. Then new flowers bloom, new students arrive, new lovers meet, and new lives unfold along its banks. Someday, beneath the same dazzling sunlight, the river will no longer be the water we once knew, yet it will continue to flow.

When I moved to Japan in 2019, I found that the relationship between people and the river was more intimate than what I had known in my hometown. In 2022, I began photographing everyday life along the Tama River near my home, drawn to the quiet continuity of life along its banks. Although people come and go, the rhythms of daily life persist, unfolding again and again beside the flowing water.

In 2024, I returned to Shanghai to photograph the Suzhou River near my family home. The once familiar landscape had changed, becoming strangely unfamiliar to me. At the same time, I sensed a closer relationship between people and the river. Confronted with these changes, I began to see the Tama River and the Suzhou River not simply as two separate landscapes, but as reflections of one another.

Separated by geography and shaped by different cultures and histories, the two rivers connect the place where I live now with the place I came from. Their waters are never the same, and the people and landscapes along their banks continue to change. Yet life goes on, quietly and persistently. Through these two rivers, different places and moments in time converge, intertwining my past and present in an endless flow.