Lili’s home

“Lili’s Home” is a photography and visual art book I created in 2025. Its creative inspiration grew from my first trip abroad that year. During my travels in Southeast Asia, I took many photographs and later gradually organized them along with numerous pictures I had taken before, eventually editing them into this book. The book’s overarching tone is black, its fiery pulse aligning with the scars on my arm.

As I was typesetting the final chapter of this book, I heard the earth’s lament.

My homeland was always a raucous terrain—a dissonance accentuated by the quiet restraint of its people. Industry thundered across that land, shrouding it in dust. Later, I drifted from place to place, my reality shifting with the contours of unfamiliar ground. Over time, I lost my sense of home, as if my bond with the earth had frayed. I became a balloon tethered fifty meters above the city center—detached, dissociated, straining to reconnect, yet unable to feel the land’s pulse.

I remember riding Wuhan’s Metro Line 2: a torrent of wind roared through the carriage, wheels screeching against steel with a sound like a cry from the depths. It was as if the earth itself was pleading, howling in anguish—a dying gesture toward the faint, far-off sun.

I know, now, that the land is dying, piece by piece. And in that moment, I understood: I wept then, and I weep now, for the same reason.

The soul of the city is crumbling. Every place has been cast from the same mold—identical forms, repetitive motions, a suffocating uniformity. All cities have grown equally hollow, and the lives upon them are mired in the same invisible chaos. The people of this land suffer so deeply. They cut off their own limbs, crush them to mud, fire them into bricks of blood; they carve out their own hearts and livers to build towering walls. Then they climb, trampling over the limbs and organs of others—crawling, scrambling, toward a dim and wordless light.

I have wandered this earth, carving my story, deepening my being. Time and again, I’ve narrowly escaped death, and been reborn. I survived. I broke out of the city’s cage.

Yet the pain only sharpened.

Countless souls remain trapped in that maze, stripped of their freedom. I lived—but the city is dying. The land is dying. The spirits of its people have turned to dust.

Now I struggle, no longer within my own world, but painfully suspended between reality and its meaning. My strength feels achingly small—too faint to save this vast and profound earth.

I can only weep. And now I see: each of my rebirths was set against the desperate, humming cry of the land I called home. I have nothing else. So I gather my tears. I fan the ember of courage. If I can change even one thing—even if it costs my life—that will be enough.

The earth that bore me, raised me, and nurtured me is dying. Those who stand upon it suffer so. My family, my friends—all lost in the same haze. Some will never find their way out.

Even if it takes my life—I would lighten their sorrow, if only by a little.

[The hand-craft flipbook video of <Lili’s home> is coming soon, Lia is creating it with lots of effort.]

Stratum

“Stratum” is a series of photographs selected from Chapter IX of my visual art book “Lili’s Home.”

The title “Stratum” refers to geological layers formed by rock, sediment, or loose deposits—structures shaped by nature over time.

These works source from photos I took between 2020 and 2025, blended through layered compositions. They embody my splintered senses under medication and physical therapy, and the stratified emotions cycled through bipolarity.

In 2019, I was diagnosed with cyclothymic disorder, also known as bipolar disorder or manic depression—a condition where mental states oscillate in relentless seasonal or cyclical waves.

To this day, I witness countless teenagers sent from schools to psychiatric wards. Under academic pressure, parents often rush to “cleanse” stigmatized illnesses like depression or OCD from their children. First comes therapy, then hospitalization and medication. When drugs fail, parents—as legal guardians—authorize physical procedures for their minor children. Unnoticed, many of us lose our right to express.

This “treatment” requires general anesthesia before channeling electricity directly into the brain. Parents are told it stabilizes moods, but at the cost of temporary amnesia. I knew nothing until wheeled into the procedure room. After seven rounds of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), each lasting thirty minutes, I lost swathes of memory. Streets of my hometown felt foreign. It took me five years to reclaim these memories, most of which I spent expressionless.

ECT stole my past. I pressed the shutter through emotional numbness, layer upon layer merging into images that mirror my fractured psyche—where dreams, memories, and reality collide.

News of fellow patients’ suicides reminds me: most of us are rendered voiceless. Many now breathe through the weight of a lifetime of silences. The mentally ill are often objects observed and defined by others; viewers gaze at images of us with voyeuristic fascination. Our expressions are too raw, too intense, too intimate to be contained—so I cloak images, hiding and slamming these emotions against the unspeakable.

Each piece is named after a moment frozen in its composite photos: endless layered days and nights where my emotions materialize in singular frames. Blending them births my “Stratum“—an overlapping of my subjective reality, a scream of rage against imposed silences from a mind refusing to be silenced.