Forty Views of Yuanmingyuan, 2022

Pigment print from collodion negatives, ink, and stamps on paper

In 1860, during the Second Opium War, British and French troops invaded Beijing, looted Yuanmingyuan, and burned it to the ground. Among the artifacts seized by French forces were the Forty Scenes paintings, which was commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor, as the only surviving visual record of the Chinese sections of the original palace complex. Today, it remains in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. 

Inspired by history, the artist traveled to Hengdian World Studios, one of the largest film sets in the world, to photograph a full-scale replica of Yuanmingyuan, which was built based on the Forty Scenes paintings. He used the collodion glass negatives, a labor-intensive 19th-century technique widely employed by early Western photographers. The images were printed as postcards and physically mailed to the museum.