Beijing 北京 2020
In January 2020, I walked the streets of Beijing during the Lunar New Year. At the time, the city was filled with the usual festive energy of the holiday, yet a subtle, quiet tension was beginning to settle over the capital as news of a mysterious outbreak in Wuhan started to surface.
These photographs capture Beijing in those final days of "normalcy"—the last rituals, the crowded subway stations, and the historic hutongs just before the world changed. Through my documentary lens, I sought to document the quiet dignity of the city on the precipice of a global crisis. It is a visual record of a moment that felt ordinary at the time, but has since become a historic boundary between the world we knew and the world that followed.
