On Spectator Specter:
There are eleven locations I've called 'home' scattered across four countries. Neither of them do I believe I have the right to call a 'home' in the traditional sense.
In the Spring of 2026 I returned 'home.' To two hometowns I describe as my 家乡 (home town, native land, fatherland, birthplace, ancestral land), 九江 (jiu jiang) 南昌(nan chang). I was born in the former and primarily grew up in the latter during the little time I spent in mainland China. I haven't been back since I was four.
I think of myself as a wanderer, a vagabond, a transient, a spectator, an outsider. The US government calls me an alien. My home country sees me as a foreigner in yellow skin. In the other places I've lived I was simply a passerby or an immigrant.
I am neither Eastern nor Western and I cannot, will not, should not be contained as either or.
I am influenced by Western philosophy yet my personal approaches toward their existential questions seem to always follow some kind of intuition rooted in Eastern thought.
In the Spring of 2026 I realized I ought to return before it is too late. Modernization efforts in China have turned these once poor and modest cities into sprawling metropolises.
I want to see my humble beginnings before they are swallowed by the opppressive pace of modernization.
Spectator Specter is the photographic series documenting my journey back.
- Yixuan, 2026
It's like something is wrong about the kind of nostalgia being conveyed where it's not a fond recollection but a specter of a memory haunting you.
What is nostalgia when it’s something you’ve grown to reminisce about but fail to feel a complete belonging to it, being so alienated from that world in ideological and cultural understanding. An old sight or smell or taste or touch or sound or atmosphere that is so familiar yet it feels like the memories of a person that isn't you. It draws on a universal feeling but lacks something about it, becoming unsettling and disconcerting. A distortion of Chinese dreamcore, something more cold, isolating, rather than celebrating or ruminating on the glory days of youth.
A crystal clear image makes it seem like the viewer is within that present moment with the photographer. Essentially a perfect account of the happenings within the captured instant. For many photos I didn’t want them to be perfect, and I often had the ISO higher than needed to add noise into the photograph. The viewer, like me, is a spectator to the events of the photograph like I am a spectator to my hometowns. The imperfections of the camera are made apparent in order to force the realization that the viewer is alienated from the actions (or inactions) of the scene.
Memory is always unclear; when looking into vaguely familiar landscapes it insists of superimposing itself onto the now changed view. Things seem smaller than what memory insists it actually is. Objects not fully rendered in memory present itself in a way that simply doesn’t seem right. It’s this combination of having seen my hometowns through my eyes and my memories that I aimed to portray with these photographs.