Windward

Yangjiang is a small coastal city in southern China where typhoons arrive almost every year. Many of the storms that crossed the South China Sea first made landfall here. I grew up in this landscape. Over time, people learned to live with the wind, the rain, the temporary damage, and the long process of rebuilding that follows each season. When I returned, I expected to find traces of disaster. Instead, the city felt quiet. Roads remained open, construction continued, monuments stood in place, and daily life moved forward without urgency. What stayed with me was not destruction itself, but the appearance of adaptation. Concrete structures rise from flooded ground. Empty halls slowly decay in humid air. Repair, reinforcement, abandonment, and persistence exist side by side here. These images are not about destruction. They observe how people continue living within conditions that cannot be fully controlled. At the same time, the increasing violence of weather raises another question: whether nature is beginning to reclaim spaces that human activity once believed were stable. I return often to photograph these places before they quietly become something else.