Migratory Bird

In numerous studies focusing on China’s internal migration, people who leave their birthplaces for a better future are often described as a “flock.” This always made me think of these individuals as birds flowing into the cities. I realized my parents were among them, and interestingly, I don’t know what their childhood home looks like. This project serves as my journey to bridge that gap, exploring how the last fifty years of significant societal transformations in China have mirrored themselves in the personal habitats and lives of its people, while also interrogating the implications of these developments in this nation in flux. Through interviewing my parents and getting to know their stories, I attempted to reconstruct the space and time with images: one-third consists of historically accurate photographs, another third of random images from the era, and the final third of synthetic images generated by AI. Accompanied by a short essay.



Hard cover ring binded publication

January - March 2024