China Everyday, by Polly Braden

I have lived in China and visited regularly over the last decade, watching the changes there. Most of the time the photographs I made came out of very specific projects or commissions. However my recent work emerged from a long artist’s residency where I opted to shoot in a more open ended, improvised way. The resulting images deal with the depiction of daily experience, particularly in Chinese cities.

Of course, we are in the midst of a rush to document the economic boom in China with its epic scenes of industry and leisure. These are the images that form the West's new image of the country. But in this rush the grain of everyday life is being overlooked. And it is in the grain, in the small details, that we can feel human significance of those bigger changes.