This is an ongoing project, which is exploring the gazing relationship between me and strangers. What happens when a Chinese girl walks on the street hand in hand with her foreign boyfriend who is 14 years older than her in Asia? When every stranger glances at her, even staring at her all the time, as a woman, how would she respond to everything? 

With all those questions I picked up the camera to respond to all the gazes, I became a powerful person who shaped stories and relationship in the image world, and the object being viewed became the person who manipulated the object. It completely dismantles the male-dominated street photography, and guides the viewer’s attention to the power, the longitude and latitude of the gaze–the gaze of the photographer, the gaze of the viewer, and the gaze reproduced in the image. The provocative gesture of “lifting up camera” not only forms a powerful dialogue with the current observation, but also challenges the entire traditional social ideology. The process of peeping allows me to re-observe the relationship of the others.

Hu Jiawen