My path to photography has not been linear. I studied Social Work in China and Social Development Practice at UCL in London, experiences that taught me to understand individual lives in relation to the larger structures around them. My later experience with the International Labour Organization widened that perspective further, towards questions of labour, development and institutions. Several years at Apple, unexpectedly perhaps, brought my attention back to the scale of the individual: to everyday encounters, to listening, and to the infinite particularity of people.

For a long time, these seemed like separate chapters of my life.

Becoming a mother, and later migrating from China to Germany, changed that. Questions I had previously encountered through study and work — family, care, belonging, displacement, dependence — became part of my own lived experience. Photography emerged during this period not simply as a new profession, but as a language through which the social and the intimate could occupy the same space.

This tension between the larger structures that shape our lives and the private ways in which we experience them remains central to my work. I am interested in what happens when questions that appear political, demographic or social are encountered at the scale of a household, a relationship, a body, or an ordinary day.

My projects therefore tend to develop slowly. I return, participate, and allow the distance between photographer and photographed to change over time. I am less interested in illustrating a subject than in understanding how it is lived.