From 2018 to 2021, Shi Yangkun spent four years photographing three villages, Huaxi Village in Jiangsu, Nanjie Village in Henan, and Dazhai Village in Shanxi. The street scenes, buildings and people's clothing there are not much different from other small towns in China. The pictures are all daily scenes and persons. The space in the village is silent, and the postures and expressions of the persons are also calm .
What a photo can only obtain is a slice of a certain time and space, which creates a tension between the detailed and true reality in a moment and the unrecordable reality as a whole. These three villages that once shared the era of collectivism have finally come to today's individual, fragmented and fluid contemporary era, with no clear vision of the future. This is the familiar scene after industrialization and marketization, which provides mixed feelings.
Just like the title “Retrotopia” implies, Shi Yangkun's record strives to capture a series of fleeting portraits of a huge dream in the fleeting history. This dream was once lost, but it continues with difficulty in the form of nostalgia. The authenticity provided by this series of photographs amounts to a forced direct examination of these marginalized memories and the current status of those who carry them.
