Fissure of a Sweetdream
Jialin Yan is a photographer from Fuzhou, China. She graduated from Newcastle University in The UK, majoring in International Financial Analysis. With her art, Jialin explored the concept of memory, focusing on individuals and groups. With her recent project, Fissure of a Sweetdream, Jialin decided to travel to Wanning, an island in Hainan Province, a well-known getaway for young people to rediscover themselves. Through her experience of leaving the day job and working through anxieties as well as observing other people who also search for answers, Jialin raises questions to understand, on a deeper layer, the output escapism provides to the people surrounding her.
An atmosphere that is created is of calmness and quest, of enjoying the moment and recognizing the possibilities the future holds. With portraits and landscapes, day-to-day life on the island is presented. It features relationships between people and also between people and nature. For Jialin, the project became a path of healing and a way of realizing that the desired utopia is a mental state to be achieved rather than a physical place to reach. As Jialin explains,” My overall feeling is like a fissure that appeared from a dream. Everyone is pursuing a utopia. But in the end, maybe utopia does not exist completely for the collective in the actual land. But it can only exist in the heart.”
‘I thought that understanding anxiety and dealing with anxiety was the core reason for me to do this project. Everyone deals with anxiety in a different way. I wanted to see what others did.’
Hi Jialian, thank you for sharing your new project Fissure of a Sweetdream. Could you tell how the project started and what were the initial images you shot when working on it?
I quit my job at the beginning of 2022, which led me to experience a state of anxiety. At that time, I was chatting with my friend who just came back to her hometown, Wanning, from Beijing. When I heard about her island life, I suddenly yearned for it. My friend invited me to travel there. She told me a lot of young people were migrating from the city to Wanning, and I became interested in this idea. I really wanted to see how young people like me, who had given up a career, would reconstruct their lives after leaving their old patterns and whether I could look at them and see if I was fit to live like them. So I went there with some doubts. At first, I wanted to get some clues about my own problems. Then I found that things had changed, and I was more like an observer watching an experimental lifestyle.
Initially, I thought that understanding anxiety and dealing with anxiety was the core reason for me to do this project. Everyone deals with anxiety in a different way. I wanted to see what others did, which launched the project. Contemporary people have their own spiritual utopia, but when this utopia materializes, what does it mean? In this society, what kind of function and role does it carry? While working on this project, I started to think: can the choice of living in Wanning help people relieve various anxieties in the social environment? Will such a choice create new problems? What are these new problems? At the end of this project, I thought I was trying to find an answer, but it didn't have to be the right answer. It's not so much an answer as an interesting reference or point of view. It shows me that young people in this day and age have more possibilities when it comes to life choices.
‘My overall feeling is like a fissure that appeared from a dream. Everyone is pursuing a utopia. But in the end, maybe utopia does not exist completely for the collective in the actual land. But it can only exist in the heart.’
The intensity of living in big cities and the stress lead people to search for more comfortable solutions such as retreat and escapism. In this manner, young people choose Wanning, a city in Hainan Province in China, for its beautiful landscapes and surfing culture. What was your experience living in the area while working on the series? What did you discover about the people who came to Wanning?
I spent a month and a half in Wanning. My experience and feelings were complex. When the project was over, I returned to the city for the first time from Hainan. I was in a trance for a long time and did not adapt to the city. When I went to Wanning for the second time, some of my friends who used to live in Wanning left, and they all left Wanning for other places, looking for a world closer to utopia.
Wanning, as a tourist city, does not have many attractions and entertainment for tourists. Young people living here spend their days riding motorcycles, surfing, skateboarding, and sunbathing. The vegetation in Wanning is dense, the natural landscape is very primitive, and there hasn't been a lot of development. It is more of a utopia than a tourist city. The natural environment is beautiful, but the actual development of the local area still faces a lot of problems, like increasingly unfriendly, rising prices, and limited job opportunities, as well as limitations of a small society with a lot of contradictions. It’s easy for new residents to be forced to leave the area if they don’t have the right skills to support themselves. As local tourism booms and outsiders come, some popular neighboring villages become increasingly noisy and unlivable due to soaring prices.
Will this place eventually abandon the people who have come and lived here for so long? When it began to develop economically, did it also begin to decline culturally and spiritually? Can a utopia based on mind and substance last forever? Will it inevitably become, as Calvino puts it, 'a false land of wonder and hope'? My overall feeling is like a fissure that appeared from a dream. Everyone is pursuing a utopia. But in the end, maybe utopia does not exist completely for the collective in the actual land. But it can only exist in the heart.
‘The subjects are like my mirrors. In the form, I am photographing them. In fact, I am observing my own problems through the dialogue between myself and others as mirrors.’
With the series, you depict a stress-free being, the connection with nature, spiritual aspects of life, and re-examination of the self. What are some of the connections you made with the people you present with the portraits?
Every time I meet other people in a photography project and finish a portrait of them, it also becomes a self-summary for me. The subjects are like my mirrors. In the form, I am photographing them. In fact, I am observing my own problems through the dialogue between myself and others as mirrors. In this project, I wanted to depict the inner state of people who move to Wanning through my portraits. In this process, when I get close to their hearts, I can see my own sense of loss and anxiety. In addition, I can feel that as the subject and I become more and more intimate, our relationship can be very intuitive in the picture.
‘The reason why photography is so important to me is that it not only helps me to heal psychologically and explore my own problems but also enables me to continue to be curious about the world while standing behind the viewfinder.’
You gained your Major in International Financial Analysis from Newcastle University in the UK. Tell about this experience and your path toward discovering yourself as a photographer.
I completed my first photography project in the real sense in 2021. After that, I realized that I was devoting more time and energy to photography. Then, I began to think that I wanted to focus on one thing, and I also wanted to spend more time on photography and creation. So at the beginning of 2022, I left tech to work as a freelance photographer, shooting commercially and working on my own art projects.
In addition, I think the reason why photography is so important to me is that it not only helps me to heal psychologically and explore my own problems but also enables me to continue to be curious about the world while standing behind the viewfinder. Through the medium of photography, I find that I am willing to keep staring at others, society, and the world. I love it, and I want to keep doing it.
What are the next project/s you’re currently focusing on or the topic you’re researching?
My next photography project is about the history of feminism in my hometown Fuzhou. In 2022, many public incidents occurred in China that hurt women. Because of this time, I started to deeply care about women's history and narrative and decided to create a series about women. I began to investigate the female images and stories in the local history of Fuzhou and Fujian. While chatting with local Fujian friends, I realized that the historical narrative about local women was not paid much attention. Few locals understand the development process of Fuzhou women. I hope to present women through video narration and let more people see them. In fact, local women in Fujian, especially in Fuzhou, have always been in a state of awakening, but the form and way of awakening are different in each era. And in different historical currents, women have been resisting an awakening wave of forced drowning and extinction.
