“For You I Will Be an Island” is a photographic series that documents my personal journey of reconciliation with the Yangtze River, exploring relationship between displacement, loss, and belonging through visual expression of memories and technology. I grew up on the banks of the Yangtze River. The Yangtze River, often referred to as China’s “Mother River,” has nurtured me. However, it was my worst nightmare as well because it flooded every year, forcing my family to gather our household belongings and flee from the village where we lived.

In this project, I used AI as an experimenting tool, combining with memories from my childhood, to create a series of visuals that imagine how my hometown and the Yangtze River may look like in the future. I printed them out and hung them on a stand.  I also recollected the household’s items that my family and I would normally take with us when the river flooded in the past. I photographed myself with these artifacts and the AI-generated visuals in front of the Yangtze River.

I take AI as a creative tool to experiment and reflect on the interactions between humans and machines, current and future.  AI assisted me in imagining how my hometown would look like in the future. However, the AI’s outlook on the future doesn’t seem optimistic, consistently depicting my hometown being buried in water or destroyed by raging waves. During my exploration along the Yangtze River, I noticed some locations that resembled the AI photographs, which surprised me at times.

I recognize that the AI-generated visuals may have the potential to spark debate, but they serve as a call to action for a more sustainable future and provoke dialogues about our collective responsibility towards nature. They also refer the scenic backdrops that were employed in early photography and movies to convey stories, transporting audiences to far-off regions, fantastical worlds, or exquisite locations that were beyond the bounds of reality. Through merging the artificial constructs with the natural world, this project presents a juxtaposition of the organic and the synthetic, the past, present, and future, questioning the boundaries of what is “real” and “unreal.”

The household items transcend their role as mere remnants of my lost home and my own deceased mother; they have become symbols of a divine sacrificial gesture, a tribute offered to the Mother River in hope of a better future, connecting personal and social, private and public, ritual and everyday practices. The project’s title, “For You I Will Be an Island,” suggests the nurturing essence of a mother. During my voyage down the River, I often came across graves that were submerged in the water, looking like lonely islands. I sincerely hope that the Mother River will always be there for us, providing a safe island for not just her human children, but also other species to survive, regardless of what our future may hold. This project is an expansion of my previous work, “Mother,” 2017.

I’d like to express my appreciation to The Canada Council for the Arts for its generous financial support, my photographer, Zen JinWen, and my family support and helps.