Introduce a Chinese photographer: Mu Ge

These photographs were taken by Muge, a Chinese photographer. I first saw them in the Atsushi Fujiwara’s photo-book exhibition at the Format Festival.

They belong to a series entitled “Going Home”. They were taken quite literally during the photographer’s journey home, an area upstream of the Changjiang. These photographs recorded immigrant revisitations home, painting a portrait of movement and the meaning of place and identity in an immigrant community (de- and re-territorialised). Differing from regular labour immigrantsin China, these peoples were forced to move away from their traditional ‘homes’ due to the building of the Three Gorges Dam.

They remind me quite poignantly of Zhangke Jia’s film Still Life （三峡好人）; both cannot return to a geographically located home anymore, and instead must re-imagine and reconstruct one.

这些照片的拍摄者是中国摄影师木格。我第一看到这些作品是在今年的Format国际摄影节。木格的作品被收录进藤原敦的摄影图册展览中。

这个系列的作品被命名为“回家”。实际上也真的是拍摄于摄影师回到长江上游家中的旅途中。拍摄的题材则是移民重归故里。不同于中国常见的劳工移民，这些出现在画面中的人多数是因修建三峡水库被迫离乡背井。

看到这些照片，我立刻回想起贾樟柯的电影《三峡好人》。这些都是回不去家的人。