China Dream
China Dream is a meditation on fractured belonging on what it means to inherit a homeland you have never truly lived in.
Between 2013 and 2017, Teresa Eng traveled repeatedly to China, tracing a personal and cultural lineage shaped by migration. Born in Canada to parents who emigrated from China via Hong Kong, Eng approached the country with a memory that was inherited rather than experienced. Her understanding of China formed through family stories and diasporic imagination met the reality of a nation in relentless transformation.
Across multiple cities and surrounding towns, she witnessed cycles of construction, demolition, and reconstruction unfolding at extraordinary speed. Entire neighborhoods vanished. Historical monuments once destroyed during the Cultural Revolution reappeared as facsimiles, replicas of replicas, rebuilt without continuity. The landscape seemed both ancient and newly invented.
This tension shapes the aesthetic of the book. Eng’s muted, stripped back palette achieved through deliberate darkroom processes echoes the instability of memory itself. The images feel suspended: neither documentary nor nostalgic, neither critique nor celebration. Instead, they occupy an in-between space, mirroring the experience of second generation diaspora navigating dual identities.
The title originates from a patriotic calendar encountered at a newsstand, but it also references the political slogan popularized in 2013 by Xi Jinping. At the same time, it subtly invokes the mythology of the “American Dream,” suggesting a global narrative in which ambition and labor promise collective prosperity.
Yet China Dream does not resolve these narratives. It lingers in ambiguity between past and future, authenticity and reconstruction, homeland and adopted country. In doing so, Eng constructs not a portrait of China alone, but of diaspora consciousness itself: layered, unsettled, and perpetually in motion.
For collectors of contemporary photography and readers engaged with migration, identity, and the politics of memory, China Dream stands as both personal inquiry and cultural reflection, a quiet yet incisive examination of what it means to belong across borders.
Language: English & Chinese
Format: Hardcover | 112 pages
Dimensions: 220 x 290mm | 925g
Publication Year: 2019 | First Edition
ISBN: 978-88-94895-28-5
Edition of 800
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