Author: Yuxi Yue&Haiqing Lan
She watched as her son rushed down the corridor with his friends. She smiled. “Are you playing hide-and-seek?” she asked, giggling, “Then I cannot help you cheat, Paofan.”
This is Xiaotang, who took up photography twelve years ago, particularly portrait and spacial photography. Six years ago, she decided to start a Taobao store from scratch.
“Family is my key to relaxation.”
Like her son, Xiaotang herself was born into a family that gave her the freedom to relax. Her parents had starkly different personalities. While her mother is always irritable and in a hurry, her father enjoyed the slower pace of life, with a cigarette. Despite these deeply rooted differences, they shared the same mindset: to never put restraints on their daughters.
She was one of those typical teenagers, always bored and complaining, with no pressure placed upon her by her parents. With the freedom to fully explore herself and pursue inner peace at a young age, Xiaotang found and learned to love the sense of security and relaxation her family gave her. Her family cultivated a state of mind that never permitted her to flinch away from a challenge.
In her early thirties, being relaxed would become the parenting skill she was the most proud of.
“He isn’t that good at Chinese, but it doesn’t matter. He is good at math. He isn’t that good that studying, but that’s alright. He is kind and honest.”
Xiaotang describes her son that way. She believes that parents cannot change who their children are. Reluctant to place over-the-top expectations on Paofan, the only thing about her son that matters to Xiaotang is that he is physically and mentally healthy.
A tragedy as it is, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed Xiaotang’s family even closer together. Her company endured the lockdown for three months, giving Xiaotang more time to spend time with with her family. Together with her husband and son, they would cooked and baked everything. Learning to cook, bake bread with the oven, study different recipes, Xiaotang spent those three months with the utmost joy.
“You get the chance to be with your child 24/7.”
Looking back at those cherished memories, Xiaotang feels that the time she spent with her family, being involved in her son’s childhood, were the most precious and colorful day of her life.
Xiaotang brings the same relaxed mindset to her greatest passion – photography. Her strong desire for beauty can be traced back to as early as her middle school days. At the time, she would collect beautiful photographs from magazines every day. She would continue to sharpen her alertness to beauty since then, eventually stumbling into her photography career. During her first year in the business, it was as if an invisible wave was constantly pushing her forward. But as time goes by, Xiaotang found photography to be more of an interest than a job. Her love for spontaneous beauty is put on full display as she brings her own personality and mindset into her work.
“I don’t pursue controversy, photographs filled with conflict, sadness, and heat. I don’t pursue the kind of great work with the stamp of times.”
Unlike the kind of stereotypical “artistic” photographers that the public generally appreciates, Xiaotang dislikes taking sensational, attention-grabbing photographs.
“What I want to convey with my lens is warmth, a feeling that is not dazzling but comforting.”
This understanding of photography also represents her relaxed attitude towards life. Instead of exaggerating pain and trauma, Xiaotang wants to deliver the warmth that cures the pain and softens the trauma, and bring the sweetness from her life to the audience.
As her experience and understanding of life grew, Xiaotang paid more attention to realism in her work. Although beauty and elegance will forever be mainstream, Xiaotang belived that authenticity is perhaps more precious and elusive. This pursuit of realism is part of the reason why her to started collecting mineral specimens.
“The mind specimen is the representative of anticity in nature.We just need to appreciate it as it is.”
Mineral specimens, from shells to stones, are all products of nature delivered in their most primitive and raw state. The texture, color, and shape of each specimen is different, as the appearances of green ghost patterns and remnants of crystal skin are not similar at all. The originality of each ore is the natural state formed by volcanic eruption caused by the movement of the earth’s crust.
“I’m curious about how the stone has endured millions of years and has landed in the palm of my hands. I’m curious about what the crystal quicksand was like millions of years ago. I’m curious about what happened to nature.”
When she went camping, Xiaotang began to learn about the mineral specimens. Whenever she picked up a shell, she would feel it subtly, and imagine how the shell had washed up on the beach and how it was picked up. This feeling that she was traveling through time strengthened Xiaotang’s understanding of authenticity in nature.
The pursuit of raw authenticity also reflects Xiaotang’s relaxed attitude towards life: unfazed, unafraid, and unadorned.