The Approach That Never Arrives
Photography  
2025
“The islands of this lake city never move, yet at times you find them farther away.”

Photographed from a small boat, each image remains suspended between approach and unreachability. The lake becomes a surface upon which the city’s quiet metabolism projects its desires, its histories, and its silences. The passing boats, the half-visible islands, and the hybrid structures shaped by tourism all reveal a slight strangeness.

This work does not document a specific place, but a way of looking from the outside—a contemporary landscape that resists intimacy, that keeps its distance while quietly gazing back at us.

The lake becomes a threshold of consciousness.






©JIAJIE ZHENG