Until I Know What Love Is (2017-)
Since 2017, I have been photographing my closest friend, Bingbing, who lives with complex mental illness. This long-term project grew out of our
shared growing up—our pain, our vulnerability, and the fragile, shifting boundary between care and control.
In China, where collectivism is prioritised and people are expected to perform ‘normal’, her existence is caught in a quiet contradiction: she is
constantly exposed, yet never truly seen. Her mental illness has long been monitored by both governmental and social systems, where what is called
care often slips into surveillance.
Through ongoing documentation with Bingbing, I started to confront the ethics of photography —not only as an act of witnessing, but as something
that may quietly violate intimacy. I have found myself carefully pulling apart the unstable threads between
photography and looking, between companionship and intrusion, between tenderness and violence, between love and pain—threads that never
settle, and perhaps never should.
