This article was originally published on Neocha and is republished with permission.
โIโm the quintessential Chinese small-town boy, someone who went to college in a big cityโShanghaiโand ended up staying,โ says Chรฉn Rรณnghuฤซ ้่ฃ่พ. Though he started out as a photojournalist, he now works in the realm of fine-art photography, and is about to embark on an MFA at Yale. This transition into art has allowed him to dig into more conceptual narratives, which, he discovered, are often inadvertently related to his own identity. โIโve reflected on my works of from recent years and realized theyโre closely linked to my personal experiences,โ he says, โOn one hand, I canโt return to my hometown, but on the other, I donโt have a Shanghaiย hukou. So in this regard, Iโm living as an inbetweener.โ
These themes of displacement and searching for belonging are the core stories he tells: in a rapidly urbanizing China, how do the youth find belonging? What are the insecurities and anxieties they collectively share?
The portraits in his seriesย Freezing Landย feature people he discovered on Kuaishou, a popular Chinese video app with millions of users mostly in third and fourth-tier cities. The videos showcased on the app present ordinary people doing everything from eating dinner to performing in drag to doing the latest viral dance. For this series, whenever he came upon someone interesting, heโd contact them through the app to meet up and take photos.
โThe most memorable person I shot during the series is the boy who does drag,โ Chen recalls. โHis videos were were intense, with views in the millions.โ
The boy was only 14 years oldย at the time Chen took his photo. Both of his parents had abandoned him, and as a foster kid, he relied on these internet performances to make money. Chen says that despite the boyโs online popularity, when they met up to shoot, all he saw was his loneliness.
The backstories of these participating models are an important part of Chenโs photo essay, but the project is a macro look at a much larger topic.
The 14-year-old boy he photographed is from Fularji, a once-booming industrial hub thatโlike many small cities in northeaster Chinaโhas fallen into decline. โThis series is the finale of my probe into the relationship between man and city,โ he says. In his projectย Petrochemical Chinaย he looks at the countryโs industrialized cities, while in the more recentย Runaway Worldย he points his lens at cities desperate to turn a buck through gimmicky tourist attractions. The final installment isย Freezing Land,ย which Chen says is an examination of cities on the verge of vanishing.
Visiting these withering cities, he sought to learn more about the younger generation who still live in them, and through their stories, shed light on their plight and anxieties. โItโs an exploration of youth and the uncertainty of their future,โ he explains.
The third and fourth-tier city residents he met through Kuaishou often relied on donations through the app to make a living, but many their accounts have ended up banned. Some have tried their hand at starting restaurants or clothing stores with the money they made on the platform, but these businesses usually failed, Chen says. โSome also end up in gangs, but most often, they choose to leave in search of opportunity.โ
The images from the series without human context paint an equally bleak picture. Chenโs cityscapes evoke imagery of the dystopian future thatโs commonly depicted in cinema: cities turned ghost town, barren stretches of land dotted with crumbling infrastructure. While these works of sci-fi remain in the realm of fantasy for now,ย Freezing Land seems to tease that in the future, these scenes may very well become reality.
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Website:ย www.ronghuichen.com
Instagram:ย @ronghuichenphotography
Contributor:ย Chen Yuan
