Silent Gestures
Silent Gestures is a photographic project rooted in my relationship with my grandmother, whom I call A Po. Rather than approaching history through spectacle or explicit documentation, the work attends to small, almost imperceptible gestures.
A Po experienced profound loss during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Her own grandfather was executed in the valley where she once lived, a place that later became both a site of trauma and survival. In her early years, she lived through extreme hardship: selling wild vegetables gathered from the mountains, walking long distances daily, and carrying night soil to make a living. She hated the land she was born into and swore never to return.
After China’s economic reforms in the 1970s, she left and built a successful business in the city where I was born and raised, supporting four children on her own. Her relationship with her hometown has always been marked by contradiction—love and resentment, attachment and refusal. Returning to these old places later in life, she holds memories of pain drive her to leave, yet the same memories are what once compelled her to work, to survive, and to protect those she loved. No matter how far she goes, she has never been able to fully sever this bond.
Now in her eighties, A Po has returned to a quieter rural life, finding peace in proximity to nature. These experiences surface through fragments in the images, showing how historical forces are carried forward through understated actions
A Po experienced profound loss during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Her own grandfather was executed in the valley where she once lived, a place that later became both a site of trauma and survival. In her early years, she lived through extreme hardship: selling wild vegetables gathered from the mountains, walking long distances daily, and carrying night soil to make a living. She hated the land she was born into and swore never to return.
After China’s economic reforms in the 1970s, she left and built a successful business in the city where I was born and raised, supporting four children on her own. Her relationship with her hometown has always been marked by contradiction—love and resentment, attachment and refusal. Returning to these old places later in life, she holds memories of pain drive her to leave, yet the same memories are what once compelled her to work, to survive, and to protect those she loved. No matter how far she goes, she has never been able to fully sever this bond.
Now in her eighties, A Po has returned to a quieter rural life, finding peace in proximity to nature. These experiences surface through fragments in the images, showing how historical forces are carried forward through understated actions