Our correspondent Deng Qiwen fell in love with Jia Yu‘s work in Arles. Here are the images and her text:
Jia Yu, Étrangers, a Tibetan Memory Rediscovered
The Jimei × Arles Discovery Award 2024 was awarded to photographer Jia Yu, upon the recommendation of curator Wang Paopao. His exhibition, Étrangers, is presented from July 7 to October 5, 2025, at Ground Control, as part of the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles.
Jia Yu, of Han ethnicity, is a primary school art teacher. He grew up in Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province before moving to Xining, the provincial capital, about 800 kilometers from his childhood home. Qinghai, a province in western China, bordering Xinjiang and Tibet, has a population of some six million, nearly half of whom are ethnic minorities and a quarter of whom are of Tibetan descent.
Despite the distance, Jia Yu has never forgotten his childhood in Yushu. Since 2003, he has regularly traveled back and forth between Xining and Yushu, particularly to the Gyaring and Ngoring Lake regions, where he photographs Tibetan Khampa families in their daily lives. He then promised to give them these portraits one day. Coming from one of the rare peoples capable of surviving above 4,000 meters in altitude, in extreme conditions of cold and rarefied oxygen, the living conditions of these Tibetan herders are at the heart of his concerns: both as an artistic subject and as an intimate gesture of returning to his origins.
The series Étrangers brings together photographs taken between 2007 and 2012, on the shores of Lake Ngoring, along the Bayan Har mountain range, and in mountain villages located on the border between Yushu and Tibet. In 2020, the artist installed cyanotypes from this series on a pass in the Bayan Har mountain range, printed on biodegradable paper. He left his contact information on them, in the hope that passing herders could help him find the people photographed.
This quest lasted an entire year. When he managed to return the images to their recipients, he also captured this reunion on video. Although some had forgotten the visit of this “stranger,” they offered him tsampa, butter tea, yak hair ropes, and even medicinal plants in return, as a token of thanks.
It was only in 2018–2019 that smartphones and 3G/4G networks became widespread in pastoral regions. As a result, very few Tibetan children of this generation have images from their childhood. To fill this void, the photographs in the exhibition are almost all printed at the maximum size of a family album: 7 inches, thus recreating, in a way, the visual memory of an entire generation.
A non-professional photographer, Jia Yu saw his award arouse some reluctance in the professional photography community. Yet, the Jimei × Arles Discovery Award is based precisely on this question: what are we trying to discover in a photography award, how do we discover it, and why?
Cristina De Middel, president of the Magnum Photos agency and a member of the jury, praised this project as “sincere, modest, and without artifice.” In her view, in a world where the future of images is becoming increasingly uncertain, this type of work reminds us that photography remains, above all, a matter of human connection. It helps us understand who we are and keep track of who we have been. It is both a tool for connection and a tool for reflection.
In this project, photographer Jia Yu and his subjects are actually strangers to one another. Yet, it is precisely Strangers that reminds us once again that photography can cross language barriers, transcend ethnic and religious differences, and be one of the most direct ways to connect human beings.
Deng Qiwen
About the Jimei × Arles Discovery Award
Created to identify and promote visual artists of Chinese descent on the international scene, the Jimei × Arles Discovery Award annually invites four curators to nominate eight photographers for a group exhibition. The winner receives a grant of 100,000 RMB and a solo exhibition at the following Rencontres d’Arles, showcasing new voices in contemporary Chinese photography.
WINNER OF THE JIMEI × ARLES DISCOVERY AWARD 2024
Jia Yu, Étrangers
From July 7 to October 5, 2025
Ground Control
Daily from 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.
