Lost in the Mist

Sichuan has always evoked in me a profound sense of familiarity intertwined with distance. As my father’s hometown, it is a place to which I am connected by blood, yet one that I have rarely truly inhabited. I have only returned a handful of times, with my last visit during the Spring Festival eight years ago. The relatives surrounding me feel almost like strangers, and within the lively atmosphere of the extended family, I often feel like an outsider who has accidentally stepped into a world that should have belonged to me. The only evidence of my connection to this land seems to be my surname.

Through conversations with my father, I gradually realized that he too carries a similar sense of displacement. The landscape he remembers from childhood has changed beyond recognition. Returning home is no longer a simple act of belonging, but one entangled with complicated family relationships and social dynamics. The place that once offered him pure relaxation and happiness has become difficult to approach. At times, he even finds himself returning quietly, almost as a stranger passing through his own hometown.

After my grandmother’s passing, my father felt his connection to this land gradually fading. The emotional bond that once tied him to his birthplace became increasingly fragile, and his desire to return diminished over time. Through extraordinary effort, he managed to leave this rural landscape behind and became one of many rural-born doctoral students who transformed their lives through education. Yet when he attempted to return as a grown man, he discovered that the hometown he carried in memory no longer existed. This transformation left him feeling lost and unsettled.

Paradoxically, he has never fully adapted to the emotional distance and alienation of the modern metropolis, yet he has also found himself unable to return to the hometown that once served as his inner sanctuary. He exists between two worlds—belonging fully to neither.

During winter, the Sichuan Basin is often enveloped in a layer of cold mist. This mist overlays the festive atmosphere of the Spring Festival with a uniquely Sichuan sense of melancholy: a quiet coldness that simultaneously carries a subtle poetic beauty. I feel that my father and I, two generations of wanderers, resemble this mist itself—we drift across this land in different yet strangely similar ways, longing for a place we love but can never fully touch.

Through my photographs, I attempt to express my deep affection for this land, as well as the delicate sense of alienation and poetic melancholy that accompanies it. Lost in the Mist explores the fragile relationship between people and their origins, between memory and reality, and between the desire to belong and the impossibility of fully returning.