{"id":2009,"date":"2025-06-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-31T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weijinchun.com\/?p=2009"},"modified":"2026-09-10T17:26:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T09:26:43","slug":"faces-of-tangshan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weijinchun.com\/en\/faces-of-tangshan\/","title":{"rendered":"Faces of Tangshan"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t

Zhu Mo, editor of Lonely Library, wrote in \u201cYearly Recommendations: Creation and Resistance\u201d:<\/p>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\tTangshan is a cradle of modern Chinese industry, and a city built on ruins. Yet in recent years, it has been repeatedly mentioned because of a social incident. A photographer from Guangxi was moved by Tangshan\u2019s history and began photographing the city. I first saw these photographs on social media, amid a stream of \u201cbeautiful images.\u201d The photographs from Tangshan seemed out of place, but they immediately caught my attention. I realized how rarely I saw images from Hebei, let alone images as unembellished and immediate as these. The photographer said that some people felt his subjects were not Tangshan people, while others were certain, after seeing the photographs, that they were. I remember noticing while editing the series that, among its many portraits, only two were of women.<\/span>\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tZhu Mo<\/cite>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t

1

My name is Wei Jinchun. I am from Guangxi and am currently a graduate student in the Department of Photography at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. In late March 2023, at the beginning of the second semester of my first year, I finally arrived on campus after the pandemic. My graduate school roommates and I took a trip to Tangshan, the hometown of another roommate.

After dinner that day, we walked through Nanhu Park, a landmark that seemed to have become an essential stop for visitors to Tangshan. The park was vast and peaceful, and the evening breeze carried the moist freshness of spring. We felt completely at ease. Then our roommate from Tangshan told us that, beautiful as Nanhu Park was now, it had once been a mining area. During the Tangshan earthquake, the ground had subsided into a pit, and the bodies of many victims had been buried together beneath it.

His words jolted me, stirring feelings I could not name. Still unsure whether to believe him, I walked on and soon found an information panel beside a small hill. It explained that, after the earthquake, rubble had been brought here and piled up to form the hill. In an instant, the landscape before me took on an entirely different meaning.

Standing on the slope, I looked out at countless rows of light poles rising like sentries in the distance. An enormous lighting tower soared into the sky, cycling through harsh reds, purples, and blues in the night, as though countless eyes were watching this land through the darkness. Wind stirred the lake into waves that glowed an eerie purple in the dusk. Ground lights illuminated the surrounding trees, alternating light and shadow across their trunks in a rhythm that felt like the earth breathing.

That night, Nanhu Park became more than a landscape. It became a bridge between me and Tangshan\u2019s history. The ground beneath my feet seemed to hold countless stories and voices from the past. When I shared these feelings with my roommate from Tangshan and suggested that he photograph his hometown, he shook his head and said, \u201cYou should be the one to photograph it.\u201d

Visiting the Tangshan Earthquake Museum of China and Tangshan Earthquake Memorial Park, I felt a weight and a shock I could not put into words. This city, struck in 1976 by an earthquake that stunned the world, made me feel the fragility and helplessness of life, as well as its own deep fractures and pain. Each time I looked at the memorial walls inscribed with the names of so many who had died, I felt reverence and grief. Years have passed, and the city has long since regained its vitality. Yet these unhealed wounds still remind us that every ordinary day is a miracle worth cherishing.

Yet neither my reasons for making this work nor its subject matter end with the history of the Tangshan earthquake and my own impressions. The deeper impetus lies in the complexity of the city itself.

The year before I began photographing, the \u201cTangshan assault incident\u201d shocked the nation. It exposed not only rampant organized crime but also longstanding social fractures in the city. Tangshan subsequently lost its \u201cNational Civilized City\u201d status, which it had received in four consecutive rounds of selection. Yet the \u201cNational Civilized City\u201d sculpture, once a symbol of pride, still stands alone in the square outside the railway station.

With these conflicting emotions, I chose a Rollei twin-lens reflex camera to express my observations and reflections on Tangshan, photographing there for a year. As I explored further, my understanding of the city became increasingly complex and multifaceted.

2

Tangshan is just over 110 kilometers from Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. Beginning in early April 2023, I rode there on my motorcycle every weekend.

It was a demanding period in the first year of my graduate studies. Alongside my coursework, I took on part-time video shoots after class. At the end of April, I rented a small room in Tangshan as a temporary base for the project. After three months of photographing, I began returning at less regular intervals. Busy as that period was, I found it fulfilling and meaningful. Coursework, paid work, and my own photography became intertwined, shaping my particular experience of graduate school.

I climbed Dachengshan and looked out over Tangshan. A new cityscape of high-rises stretched before me. On the summit, a headless bodhisattva statue looked desolate in the fierce backlight of the blazing sun. On Fengshan, I saw statues of deities locked inside a cave\u2014forgotten religious symbols, unnoticed, yet silently watching over the land. From the summit, a vast opening in a mine resembled a scar in the earth, revealing a past that had not healed. Toward evening, a coal train cut across the horizon and traveled into the distance as the sun sank. It was sunset over a fractured city, with night about to fall.

At an abandoned mine near Douhe Reservoir in Tangshan\u2019s Kaiping District, scattered animal bones and building ruins formed a startling scene. It seemed both a silent accusation from nature and a metaphor for the city\u2019s present condition: a city reborn from the rubble of an earthquake now facing the many challenges of economic transition.

In a factory dormitory on the outskirts of Guye District, a huge crack had opened in a wall. A worker had tried to patch it with a rodent glue trap covered in hair. Clearly, such a repair could not save this dangerously unstable building.

Once known as a \u201ccity of steel,\u201d Tangshan is gradually changing as environmental policies advance and its economy is restructured. At a hot-rolling steel mill in Zunhua, Tangshan, numerous elaborate landscapes of \u201cclear waters and green mountains\u201d had been painted on a huge cooling tower and the exterior walls of the factory buildings. This contrast created a distinctive urban landscape.

History and the present intertwine. These memories, like symbols, weave together my particular impression of the city. Tangshan is now experiencing the growing pains of industrial transformation, searching for a new way forward amid an imbalance between its economy and culture. The uncertainty and hope, resilience and struggle of this modern city are what I want to depict and explore through photography.

3

This northern industrial city has also fostered a distinctive character among its people. In the countryside, Tangshan residents are unassuming and resilient, as though held in an earlier time. Those in the urban center have a cosmopolitan air, with a distinctly modern manner of speaking and behaving.

In June 2023, I came across a lively custom motorcycle competition in Taiyangcheng Square in Tangshan\u2019s Lubei District. It was a gathering full of individuality and enthusiasm. Participants wore flamboyant, hippie-style clothing, and many had extensive tattoos. As a motorcycle enthusiast who had previously worked in Beijing, I was surprised. Under Beijing\u2019s strict regulations, modifications on this scale were almost unimaginable. In Tangshan, however, this wild, expressive custom motorcycle culture was on full display. It gave me a new appreciation of the city\u2019s freedom and exuberance.

I met a group of riders there and joined them on a trip to the Zhangbei grasslands in August. On the expressway from Zhangjiakou to Tangshan, a journey of more than 400 kilometers, their large-displacement motorcycles darted through traffic. My bike had the smallest engine, and even with the throttle wide open I struggled to keep up. For the first time, I felt I had reached my motorcycle\u2019s limit, even pushing it to the point where the fuel cut off. After dark, my mild nearsightedness blurred my vision, but the group maintained an astonishing pace. The ride terrified me, yet it also gave me a deeper sense of the wild, unrestrained spirit of Tangshan\u2019s young people.

While working on the project, I also met many other \u201cunusual\u201d Tangshan people. On a sweltering day in a village in Kaiping District, I saw a woman living on the streets, completely naked, lying at ease and fast asleep on the road. In another outlying area one winter, I encountered a man in military-style clothing, covered in medals, with large, heavy, extravagant rings on all ten fingers. Wearing sunglasses and listening to music through earphones, he radiated an inexplicable confidence.

Interestingly, some local people, including one of my teachers, thought that the people I photographed were not \u201creal Tangshan people.\u201d

At first, I thought they might find it difficult to accept the lives I depicted and the landscapes that seemed infused with magical realism. Only after speaking with a fellow photographer from Tangshan did I begin to see a possible reason. In his eyes, only residents of the central Lunan and Lubei districts counted as \u201creal Tangshan people.\u201d Those in the outlying districts and counties did not.

To him, \u201cTangshan people\u201d had unmistakable traits: they were well-fed, had strong personalities, and liked to make a show of things. Some liked to wear thick gold necklaces, and some liked to boast. He singled out one of my black-and-white photographs of a man with medium-length hair, a small mustache, glasses, and a distinctive bearing. This man, he said, was definitely a \u201cTangshan person.\u201d

But through my lens, all these different Tangshan people\u2014whether from the urban center or the outlying districts and counties, rich or poor\u2014are real and indispensable parts of this place. Although not every local resident identifies with my perspective, many people from Tangshan love and support my work.

One warmhearted older man from Laoting County in Tangshan, an enthusiast of contemporary photography, became a friend after we met at Lishui Photography Festival. He came to my exhibitions several times to support me, bringing roast chicken and shaobing flatbreads from his hometown. I was deeply moved by his friendship.

Through the distinctive texture and perspective of a Rollei twin-lens reflex camera, I try to capture the particular imprint of our times on this city\u2014to find reality in the details, and through that reality, to touch the times we live in.<\/p>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t


Text and photographs by Wei Jinchun

This article was first published on the Lonely Library WeChat public account on February 12, 2025. With thanks to Lonely Library.


<\/p>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\"\"<\/a>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beginning in 2023, Wei Jinchun spent a year photographing Tangshan, Hebei, with a twin-lens reflex camera. The work is grounded in the city\u2019s layered history and social realities: its rebirth from earthquake rubble, the painful landscape changes accompanying industrial transformation, and its struggle to reshape its public image. Through documentary depictions of residents from the urban center and outlying districts and counties, alongside scenes of magical realism, the series conveys the distinctive human character and imprint of the times in a northern industrial city shaped by hardship, struggle, and an unrestrained spirit.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"set","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weijinchun.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weijinchun.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weijinchun.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weijinchun.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weijinchun.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2009"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/weijinchun.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2237,"href":"https:\/\/weijinchun.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2009\/revisions\/2237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weijinchun.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weijinchun.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weijinchun.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}