Between Mountains and Sea

Between Mountains and Sea is an ongoing photographic project I have been developing in the Shanhaiguan region for more than a year. During this time, I have returned to the area repeatedly, traveling alone with a film camera through its passes, villages, ruins, mountains, and coastline, wandering almost like a swordsman journeying through the landscape in ancient China.

Historically known as Yuguan, Shanhaiguan lies between the remaining ranges of the Yan Mountains to the north and the Bohai Sea to the south. Situated at this natural threshold between mountain and sea, it has long served as a strategic passage connecting northeastern and northern China. From the establishment of the pass during the Ming dynasty onward, the region developed into an extensive and highly complex system of military defenses. Having witnessed countless conflicts, dynastic transitions, and the continual rise and fall of political powers, Shanhaiguan occupies a significant place in the historical imagination of China.

Using a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera and black-and-white film, I approach the landscape through a mode of looking reminiscent of the ancient Chinese tradition of composing and contemplating poems of historical remembrance. Through walking and observing, I record the region’s historical remains and contemporary human landscape. The images seek to evoke a sense of timelessness in which the ancient and the contemporary coexist, allowing different moments in time to overlap within a single frame.

The relatively intimate scale of the prints further emphasizes the quiet and contemplative quality of the black-and-white images. In this sense, they draw upon the restrained elegance of literati landscape painting from the Song dynasty, while also echoing the literary character of the traditional Chinese huaigu—poetry and writing that contemplate the past through the present landscape.

As a student with a background in mathematics, I consciously introduce a stronger sense of geometry and mathematical order into my compositions. The square format of the medium-format negative plays an important role in this process, allowing me to explore balance, proportion, repetition, symmetry, and spatial relationships within the image.

For me, the incorporation of mathematical beauty is not merely a formal device. It is part of an ongoing inquiry into the relationship between rational structure and artistic perception. By creating images in which geometric order and poetic ambiguity coexist, I hope to draw the viewer into the photograph through its visual structure, and from there toward its deeper poetic and conceptual dimensions. Between Mountains and Sea therefore becomes not only an exploration of a particular historical landscape, but also an ongoing investigation into the ways in which mathematical thought and artistic practice can intersect, complement, and transform one another.