New photo display shows British Chinese community’s sense of place
The University of Huddersfield’s senior lecturer in photography Dr Yan Wang Preston has explored how Britain’s Chinese community sees itself in an array of different places and landscapes in a series of photos now on display at the Manchester Museum.
Dr Preston, who moved to the UK in 2005 and has taught at the University of Huddersfield since 2018, felt that the Chinese community’s contribution to the country was under-represented but has addressed this with her work Here and Now on display at the Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery.
Her first major project as a photographic artist was Mother River, an epic-scale series of shots of the Yangtze River taken at 100km intervals of the river’s 6,211km length.
Study Photography at the University of Huddersfield
Here and Now also takes an interest in landscape, but varies with photos of members of Britain’s Chinese community taken in urban settings like central Manchester, in their back gardens or out on the moors of West Yorkshire.
“We are invisible. I have done a lot of research and there is not much pictorial representation of the British Chinese community in the national archive. It is a blank canvas for me,” says Dr Preston.
“My interest is in landscape and the sense of belonging you can have with landscape representation would be very fitting to picture these people in a landscape representation of their own choice – to literally put them on the map.
I wanted to portray people in an open landscape outside of their houses – in parks and gardens, on the moors – because the Chinese community is here but we are not really in the national portfolio of pictures.
Dr Yan Wang Preston - Senior Lecturer in Photography
“I approached people I thought were appropriate from all walks of life, because the Chinese community is very well integrated. We are not just take-away owners, we are in all sorts of areas. I invited lawyers, lieutenants of Manchester, business people, take-away chefs, tattoo artists, with an age range of seven to 83 years old.
“I asked them all where they would like to be pictured? They chose locations where they have memories and a sense of belonging.
“One lady, a lawyer, wanted to be photographed on the street near Chinatown in Manchester, because it was familiar to her. It was very difficult to do in a busy street, but it said a lot about her sense of belonging. Others wanted to go to the moors, quite far from their houses.”
The feedback from the subjects of Dr Wang Preston’s photos has been uniformly positive, with their sense of pride making the project a hugely rewarding one for her.
“It is not my most artistic work, but I am very content. I have done a good job to present my community – I belong to many different ones, but I feel I have done this in a very positive light. It is a complete celebration of the British Chinese community, I promised to show them with total dignity, respect and openness.
"We are part of the landscape, we are not isolated and I feel I have shown that with the pictures.”