“Translation: 2019 the 11thThree Shadows Photography Award” successfully opened on April 6 at the beginning of a beautiful spring in Beijing. The winner of this year’s Three Shadows Photography Award is a duo – Liu Ke and Huang Huang, both from Chengdu, who received an 80,000 RMB prize. Zhang Lanpo won the Media Award, and Wang YingYing took away the TSPA Luo Bonian Award for Outstanding Photographer, which comes with 10,000 RMB.
Where My Heart Settles Down
Since the divorce of my parents when I was little and the estrangement between my father and me, my only impression of my family when it was still complete is, in addition to my fragmented childhood memories, my birthplace of Guantao, Hebei Province, which my mother mentions to me every now and then.
My father was labeled as a rightist in 1960 and sent down to do manual labor for 17 years in Wangqiao Village, party of Guantao. During that time, he met my mother through someone else and I was born in 1976 in this place which has nothing to do with my parents’ ancestral homes or where they had grown up.After the Cultural Revolution my father returned to work in Beijing after his case had been redressed. And I began to commute between Hangzhou and Beijing with my mother. Subsequently, I have been living with my elder brother and my mother in Hangzhou since the separation of my parents. And I had not gone back to my birthplace, Guantao, for a very long time. However, the separation of my family had always been troubling to me since my childhood. The unfamiliarity of a father figure led to a lack of self-identity, which became my biggest psychological problem. Finally in 2015 I set out on a journey to my birthplace, Guantao, attempting to explore with images the clues of the time when my original family was still complete in order to fulfill the realization of my self-identity and a need for intimate relationships. Moreover, I recorded the later years of my parents, whose lives have never converged since their divorce in early 1980s. By withdrawing from my relationships with my parents and observing from the equal perspectives of an adult their similar living habits, I realized a healing of and reconciliation with my emotional wound caused by my original family.