‘They Feel Like They Can’t Go Home’
In September 2014, while waiting for access to photograph Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, a Chinese photographer who calls himself “Ali” came upon a large group of students from his home country at a local restaurant. He knew that many young...
‘I Love HK but Hate It at the Same Time’
A central issue many of the Hong Kong people in my portraits are wrestling with is how to define an identity and being challenged in that pursuit by cultural, social, or political pressures. There is a lot of frustration and anger over the recent...
Chiang Mai’s Chinese Transfer Students
On a chilly winter Friday in early 2013, seven-year-old Zou Yanhu came home from school, looking dejected. Yanhu was a first-grader attending a public primary school in Chengdu, Sichuan’s sprawling capital city. His weekend homework was to write...
The Face of China’s #MeToo Movement Enters the Fray
In the summer of 2014, Zhou Xiaoxuan, then a 21-year-old living in Beijing, filed a report with the local police. She described what had happened the previous day when she had delivered a basket of fruit to one of China’s most prominent news...
The Choreographed Global Journey of Your Household Products
U.S.-China trade is not merely a political question; it exists within a massive system that has been built over decades, the accretive results of countless choices by governments, businesses, consumers, and workers. It is at once a heaving,...
23 Days, 1,300 Miles, and Some Very High Expectations
“We were at an altitude of 15,000 feet on Mount Haizi. It started to hail. The temperature dropped to 40 degrees. We were only wearing t-shirts. They didn’t stop biking.” It was photographer Wang He’s second time on the Tibetan Plateau. The first...
Showing the Dead a Good Time
This photo gallery is part of Tomoko Kikuchi’s “Drag Queens for the Dearly Departed,” a project she shot as an Abigail Cohen Fellow in Documentary Photography. Too see the...
Seeing 2016 Through Eyes on China
In June 2015, a couple dozen China-based photographers—some Chinese, some not—founded the Instagram account Eyes on China. Their goal, as member photographer Gilles...
Same Tough Start, Radically Different Lives
According to my caretakers at the orphanage, Chunchun arrived a few years before I did, when she was a baby. They estimate that I was around three or four years old at the time of my arrival, howling and screaming at the top of my...
Finding the Women at China’s Big Meetings
Each March, some 5,000 delegates from across China gather in Beijing for the annual meetings of the National People’s Congress (NPC),...
The Last Days of the 6 RMB Hotel
from Tencent QQBeginning in 1981 when it opened its doors in the Chinese city of Wuxi in Jiangsu province, the Big Paddy’s Edge Inn attracted some of the city’s most colorful characters. The inn’s proprietor, Gu Qimei, charged a rock-bottom nightly fee of 6...
Migrant Hair
This photo series of Chinese hairdressers was made in the spring of 2012, in the city center of Chengdu in Sichuan province. There, some 16 percent of the city’s...
Silent Spring on the Huangpu River
This past July, Shanghai’s Huangpu River—known for more than...
The Hong Kong Protests in Pictures
As thousands of people remain on the streets of Hong Kong, even after local police tried to disperse their protests with hoses and tear gas, here is a collection of images of how the protests—that are calling for greater democracy in Hong Kong—...
A History of China and U.S. Leaders Meeting Through The Years
When the first U.S. President visited China, he was no longer president. Ulysses S. Grant traveled in Asia in 1879. The Qing empire was embroiled in a dispute with Japan over territorial claims to the Ryuku Islands and wanted the U.S. to mediate...
Soccer on the Silk Road
from Tencent QQAs the World Cup draws to a close, we present a photo essay by Chinese photographer Zhang Xinmin exploring the game of soccer along the Silk Road in Xinjiang, where it has a special place in Uighur education and culture. China’s forays into...
Sunflower Protestors Open Up
On March 18 some 200 Taiwanese, mostly college students, stormed the offices of Taiwan’s legislature, beginning a protest over a proposed trade...
First Comes Love, Then Comes...the Photo Shoot
from Institute for Artist ManagementThe wedding banquet comes later. For many Chinese couples, married life really begins in the photo studio where, basted in glitter and hair gel, the brides dressed for a debut at La Scala or night out with Fabio, they gaze upon sets so tufted and...
The Floating City: Inside Hong Kong Now
Hong Kong rose up as the essential gateway into Communist China over the second half of the twentieth century—a British-run laissez-faire playground whose bottom-line pragmatism proved lucrative for all, maintaining a fluid, delicate balance...
Welcome to Wuwucun, a Village in the City
Tucked amidst the factories and shops of of the Longgang district of the southern boomtown of Shenzhen sits a handful of narrow Qing Dynasty lanes collectively called Wuwucun, after the original Hakka minority Wu clan who established the village...