Deep

One night, after working overtime until 3 a.m., I was on my way home when I happened to pass through the hutongs. I had my camera with me, so I started wandering around aimlessly, taking pictures of the hutongs deep in the night.

Before that night, I had never had any particular thoughts about hutongs, late nights, projects, or anything like that. After all, hutongs had always been one of the subjects I photographed most often. But something about that night felt almost like a spell. As I walked through the alleys, I felt as if I were being summoned by something. Like the “aura” Walter Benjamin wrote about in A Little History of Photography, I suddenly wanted to photograph something I could only describe as “depth.”

At the time, I was deeply influenced by Bruce Gilden. I carried a flash around and photographed people everywhere I went. But after doing it for a while, I began to grow tired of it. I often found myself thinking, “If I keep shooting like this, the most I could ever become is a Chinese Bruce Gilden.” But even then, that would still be Nothing. And Nothing means Nobody.

In photography—or perhaps in art more broadly—imitation without thought is almost always the beginning of failure.

But something interesting happens when you truly immerse yourself in the street: you begin to discover things you never noticed before.

I secretly call this ability a kind of “street photography instinct.” It is difficult to explain exactly what this instinct is. But any experienced and serious street photographer, once they step into the street, will know that feeling. There is a particular sensitivity to things around you, a way of sensing that something is about to happen—or that something is already there, waiting to be noticed. Perhaps that sensitivity itself is the instinct.

So when I was walking alone through the hutongs at three in the morning, that inexplicable “aura” told me that something had suddenly changed.

It was as if another pair of eyes had opened.

I began to perceive this familiar yet strangely unfamiliar world around me with an unusual sensitivity.

If the hutongs during the day are filled with noise and bustle, a scene of “warmth,” then the hutongs deep at night belong to “coldness” and absolute silence.

Without the noisy crowds of daytime, the first thing you notice is how everything around you has fallen quiet. But if you stay there long enough, standing completely still and becoming one of the objects inside the sleeping hutong, you begin to realize that all these forgotten things have their own language.

They whisper endlessly.

They make their own sounds.

Perhaps because I had also been influenced by the Cthulhu Mythos, the hutongs deep at night seemed to radiate a strange fascination with the unknowable.

There was not a single person around, yet through the objects they had left behind, you could still see evidence that human beings had lived here. It felt almost like looking through a crystal ball into some post-apocalyptic vision.

Walking through these murmuring alleys at night, I began to feel strangely unreal. I felt like a wandering ghost, capable only of coldly and objectively recording fragments left behind after the end of the world.

I kept desperately trying to grasp something.

But somehow, there was never anything I could truly hold on to.

“Everything has its own temperature. But you can clearly feel that it has gone cold.”

That thought stayed in my mind.

What fascinates me most is that through these objects, you can begin to imagine the desires of the people who live here during the day: envy, pride, sloth, greed, lust—and, of course, the most primitive forms of ignorance, insignificance, and madness, along with the cries of tiny human beings placing their hopes in the future.

In the depth of night, I, as the photographer, became almost like a messenger of the devil, carrying a flash and mercilessly dragging everything hidden into the light.

You could photograph the greed surrounding lottery tickets. You could photograph the eroticism suggested by underwear hanging outside. You could photograph an unattended cactus covered in thorns. You could see the boundless expectations people place upon the next generation.

Everything people are too ashamed to speak about during the day suddenly becomes loud and unapologetic in the middle of the night.

“Does the night conceal, or does it reveal?”

That is a secret.