PHOTOBOOK / 2022
AN UNNECESSARY
LONG NIGHT
《长夜将尽》源自一段持续多年的观看经验。
很长时间里，我受困于一种清晰、稳定而强有力的现实叙事之中，一切被赋予标准意义，被不断归类和排列整齐。
在这种秩序之外，我始终会被另一些东西吸引：无关紧要的角落、短暂失控的瞬间、无法被概括的情绪，以及那些正在消失却无人留意的痕迹。起初我并不知道为什么要拍它们，只是凭着本能不断保存。多年以后重新面对这些照片，我才意识到，它们真正记录的并不是一座城市的变迁，也无意成为某个时代的证明。它们留下的是一个人与现实长期相处之后产生的偏差、迟疑和拒绝，是一些无法被宏大意义完全吸收的个人经验。
也正是在这个意义上，西宁获得了另一层含义。它不再只是一个地理名称，也不是作品需要加以辨认和说明的对象，而是我长期被放置其中的一块现实。许多事情在这里发生、消失、被替换，我也在其中生活、工作，并逐渐形成自己的观看。因此我并不试图回答“西宁是什么”，而只是借由这座城市，确认自己与现实究竟发生过怎样的关系。
AN UNNECESSARY LONG NIGHT grew out of years of looking.
For a long time, I found myself trapped within a clear, stable, and powerful narrative of reality, in which everything was assigned a standard meaning, continuously classified, ordered, and put into place.
Outside this order, I was always drawn to other things: insignificant corners, brief moments when things slipped out of control, emotions that resisted definition, and traces that were disappearing without being noticed. At first, I did not know why I photographed them. I simply kept preserving them on instinct. Years later, when I returned to these photographs, I realized that what they recorded was not really the transformation of a city, nor were they intended as evidence of an era. What remained was the deviation, hesitation, and refusal that emerge from a person’s prolonged encounter with reality—individual experiences that cannot be fully absorbed into any larger meaning.
It is in this sense that Xining takes on another meaning. It is no longer merely a geographical name, nor an object that the work needs to identify or explain, but the reality into which I have long been placed. Things happen here, disappear, and are replaced. I live and work within this process, and gradually form my own way of seeing. I am therefore not trying to answer the question, “What is Xining?” Rather, through this city, I am trying to determine what kind of relationship has actually taken shape between reality and myself.
