Yanbian,Yanbian
2025--

 The Yanbian Series emerges from over a decade of living in South Korea and from the experience of cross-cultural mobility. Rather than approaching Yanbian through ethnic lineage or territorial belonging, the work adopts frameworks of emotional geography and topophilia, understanding Yanbian as a borderland continuously produced through layered forces of historical migration, linguistic contact, and state policies. Long-term engagement with the Chinese immigrant community in Seoul’s Daerim district and the multicultural city of Ansan has cultivated an acute sensitivity to transborder labor, cultural hybridity, and ambiguous identity formations across Northeast Asia.

 Upon returning to China and redirecting the gaze toward Yanbian, this sensibility transforms into an immigrant-oriented empathetic gaze: Yanbian is perceived as a region within China that occupies a unique position and context, maintaining historical and contextual continuity with the Korean Peninsula while simultaneously sustaining institutional and cultural distance. Consequently, the photographic practice neither reproduces an ethnographic documentary perspective nor lapses into the romanticism of a homeland narrative. Instead, it probes a more intricate question: how placeness is affectively experienced, absorbed, and internalized through the institutional forces of border geography, the embodied practices of everyday life, and the lived realities of cross-contextual encounters.

 Within the images, landscapes and individuals carry multiple threads—transborder histories, labor migrations, linguistic hybridity, and regional imaginaries—rendering Yanbian as a space of ambiguous affect and open-ended meaning. Its significance is not confined to ethnic identity, but extends into the broader geopolitical and cultural structures of Northeast Asia.