From issue: #20 The Graduate Issue 2023
Hujiang is a remote island close to the border of China; from the beginning of the 20th century many people illegally sailed from Hujiang along the Pacific, looking for opportunities elsewhere and, after 1980, to escape the one-child policy. Many of these migrants were forced to leave behind babies and young children, cared for by their grandparents and elders, including Yshao Lin’s own parents. They went abroad when he was five years old and were unable to reunite with him until he was 14, leaving him with his grandparents. Lin has lived a life on the move, relocating from Hujiang to bigger cities in China for a better education, then to New York, Chicago, London, and Lausanne, Switzerland. Lin says that his story isn’t unusual, but that it left him with a blurred sense of identity, and in the project When They Ring Those Golden Bells he aims to both explore this identity and reconnect China’s past to its current radical change.
Born in 1993 in Fuzhou, China, Yshao Lin has just graduated from ECAL in Switzerland (the Ecole catonale d’art de Lausanne)) with an MA in Photography, and has previously studied photography and art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Central Saint Martins, London. Lin was selected for Antoine d’Agata’s residency in Arles, France in 2019 and has exhibited his works in group shows at Tate Modern, London and Fosun Foundation Art in Shanghai.
Find out more about Yshao Lin here.
