长干行 2012-2012/2012
Cathay is a long-term photographic project created between 2011 and 2025.
Structured as nineteen diptychs, the series re-imagines Ezra Pound’s English translations of classical Chinese poems through a method of visual translation.
Each diptych pairs a color image with a black-and-white image—two temporalities, two visual languages—brought into a single field of meaning. Many of the images were made more than a decade apart; some were photographed recently. Their coexistence creates a layered sense of time, memory, and return, echoing the way Pound’s translations connected distant histories.
Rather than illustrating the poems, Cathay interprets their rhythm, silence, and emotional structure.
The work moves between clarity and blur, presence and disappearance, accident and intention—holding the fragility of time as its core material.
Across fourteen years of making, the series has grown into an inquiry about image, translation, and the endurance of inner life. It is both a meditation on poetic lineage and a record of how photographs can carry the traces of lived time.
