“Solo Date” rejects the linear order of memory, wandering between the mundane and the infinite to reveal how an individual finds belonging within a dream-like reality by embracing solitude.

I have been a foreigner in three countries. Photography is the only language I have never had to translate. And yet — I make photographs because I cannot describe them.

I was born in China. At sixteen, I moved to Japan and stayed for seven years. Now I am in the United States. Each move carried its own solitude — the specific weight of belonging somewhere, and then belonging somewhere else, of becoming a stranger again just when the ground had started to feel solid.

Language has always marked those borders. I write in Chinese, my mother tongue, because that is where my inner voice lives. I speak about photography in Japanese and Chinese — the two places where I first learned to see. And now, working on my first series in America, I find myself writing about my images in English, my third language, with a vocabulary that keeps falling short.

That gap is where this project begins.

When I sat with these photographs and reached for words, I kept losing something in the translation. And then something unexpected happened: I stopped reaching. I realized the photographs were not asking to be described. They were already speaking — in a grammar made of light, instinct, and emotion. Photography crosses borders that language cannot. You do not need to know where I grew up to feel something when you look at one of these images.

In this series, I move through everyday reality in search of the surreal — moments where ordinary light tips into something dreamlike, where a gesture or a space suddenly holds more than it should. The work is driven by the subconscious: I photograph what pulls at me before I understand why. The meaning comes later, or not at all, and that is fine.

This is a journey through loneliness and estrangement, toward belonging. Not a destination — the traveling itself.

These photographs are evidence that I was here. That I looked. That looking, in the end, was enough.