Wen ZHAO

Promised Land

应许之地

In the autumn of 2019, I first came to Yongtai, a village in Gansu province, which used to be a border post during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The ancestors of the locals used to be military families back in those days, who were forced to go to the battlefields to be the pawns of the generals during wartime, and back home for supporting the government by being peasants and shepherds in the peaceful time. Their loyalty, diligence, and countless sacrifices are just to make the promise of having their own land come true.
So I got the idea of this photo project Promised Land by taking photos of these kinds of spaces: they used to play an irreplaceable role at certain times in history. The people who lived there were once promised a lot of things such as promotions, being rich, milk, and honey… But for a lot of different reasons, these places were eventually deserted, and those promises were either turned into lies, tears, or blood.