The birth of photography is more like a high-intensity arced light illuminating all hidden corners of the world. Through the lens of early Western photographers such as John Thomson (1837-1921), this unfamiliar empire amid the roar of steamships increasingly showed the fading loneliness of classicality.
Globalization, through the dumping of commodities and culture, has wiped out the warmth and respect of different civilizations, and turned the world into a hunting ground for capital and desire. It is necessary for mankind to return to the initial gaze of civilization and to examine our original appearance at the source of images without prejudice and full of affection.
Pierre Loti, 1850-1923
Les Deniers Tours de Pekin, a diary series, written by Pierre Loti in 1902 at Le Marché Brassens in Paris. He came to China with Le Redoutable and lived in the imperial city in the Gengzi year. In his works, he described the weird Bohai Bay, the dilapidated old capital, the abandoned Forbidden City, the blood-red palace walls, the pale floating corpses, the green lotus ponds, and the fantasy images of the deep palace pavilion, depicting the tragic and poignant beauty of the withering ancient civilization between reality and illusion. It simultaneously deconstructed and reconstructed the mysterious and magical remnant of classical China in the eyes of Westerners, bit by bit.