A Slow Boat to China 去中国的慢船
A Slow Boat to China 去中国的慢船
“March 21, 2004. Sunny. I bought a hundred rolls of film and a large suitcase before going to Shanghai.”
— Koji Onaka 尾仲浩二
A boat offers a different way of moving through the world. Unlike a train bound to its tracks, a boat drifts without a fixed route, carried freely across the water. This sense of wandering, openness, and chance encounters has long informed Onaka's photographic practice, where the journey matters as much as the destination.
Brings together 70 colour photographs taken during Onaka's journey through China between 21 March and 23 April 2004. Co-published by Jiazazhi and Place M, the book draws connections between Onaka's celebrated black-and-white photobook Slow Boat and Haruki Murakami's short story A Slow Boat to China, extending a shared fascination with travel, memory, and the passage of time.
Two decades after the photographs were made, Onaka discovered that the original colour negatives had begun to fade. Before their images disappeared entirely, he enlarged them onto expired photographic paper, preserving these fleeting impressions of China in a new material form.
The resulting photographs carry the traces of both the journey and the passing years. They become more than records of places encountered; they are fragments of a personal archive, rescued from fading negatives and held in the present through the photographic process.
A Slow Boat to China 去中国的慢船 is a meditation on wandering, impermanence, and the fragile nature of photographic memory. Like a boat drifting without a fixed destination, the book invites readers to travel through images and recollections, pausing along the way to consider what remains when time begins to erase the past.
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Language: Chinese & Japanese
Format: Hardcover | 109 pages, 70 images
Dimension: 240 x 180mm | 410g
Publication Year: 2024
ISBN: 978-4-905360-43-8
Limited Edition of 800
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