Finding You Is My Courage: New Stories of Homecoming in Chinese Photography Since the 2000s

Abstract

Homecoming has been a complex concept affecting Chinese people of every generation since ancient times. As China underwent accelerating urbanization from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s, the landscape of urban and rural China witnessed unprecedented change. Out of sensitivity to the evolution of social landscape and the participants of the great migration from the countryside/towns to big cities, Chinese photographers of the late 1970s and the early 1980s took photographs with high self-consciousness and knowledge of the characteristics of the time. Against the backdrop of globalization, they continued with various endeavors on the “photography of social landscapes,” which emerged in world photography in the 1960s, recording the people and stories in their hometowns and offering a series of personalized works with distinctive local features. This article will focus on three representative photographers from this generation—Muge, Park Il-kwon, and Zhang Xiao—and their new stories of homecoming to discuss how photographers, during a period of significant changes in rural China, recreated the identity of individuals and their communities by capturing the social landscape and took it as a remedy for their identity anxiety as “internal migrants.”