Faërie (V)

About this work

My project 'Faërie' explores the traditional Chinese literati gardens as a form of spatial imagination. At the mouth of the Yangtze River is the fertile flood plain where many intellectuals of the old dynasties made their retirement home. Here, they build their private Gardens, characterising artificial mountains made of stones from the Lake Tai, winding corridors and pavilions upon quiet ponds. Time seems to work differently within and outside the gardens. A thousand years could have passed in the real world while merely a day in the gardens. As such, the literati garden is a Faërie within the real world. In effect, literati garden do not follow the law of the Nature, nor are they mere simulation of our Primary World. Rather, the scholar-official of the dynastic China who built them were Sub-Creators of a Secondary World, in the same way, as J. R. R. Tolkien argued, that fairy-story authors create a Secondary World, a Faërie, that follows its own law, free from the domination of observed ‘fact’, and into which our mind can enter and find Escape and Consolation. Literati gardens are three-dimensional Secondary World, into which we can physically enter, and Escape, not only from the old or modern ‘real life’, but more importantly, from the ultimate Doom: Death. After all, in the Ming Dynasty classic literature 'The Peony Pavilion', it was in the garden that a fair maiden dreamt of her true lover and later woke up from Death for him. From 'The Peony Pavilion' to other ancient folk tales full of fairies, ghosts and spirits, Gardens have always been the background, a  fictional time and space, in which our ultimate desire could be fulfilled: to escape mortality. My photographic project represents the gardens as the Otherworld. Photography as a medium is traditionally associated with reality. However, in the 19th century, ‘spirit photography' has been used to portray the existence of supernatural phenomena and make the invisible seen. Using the techniques of long exposure and double exposure, I am reframing reality and transforming the noisy tourist attractions that the gardens have become today into images of mysterious realm, each on one single negative. When the setting sun shines upon the lotus flower in the middle of the lake or when the goldfish disappears into the depth, viewers could look beyond the material world. Drawing on photographic medium’s traditional ‘truth claim’, the photographic images help us to find this hidden Faërie, beautiful but illusive, forever an object of human desire. The physicality and credibility of analog photography transforms my creation into belief of such Faërie’s existence * This is the winning piece of the Eve Arnold Photography Prize of the Women in Art Prize 2026.

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