By Jingyuan Li
This zine includes Li's own tourist photographs, found images, and documents to investigate a special area along the silk road. The area that is about 820 miles on the longitude, featuring cities such as Alashan, Jiuquan, Zhangye, and Yumen, contains few sites that were marked as milestones in history respectively: an ancient library that sheltered thousands of Buddhism manuscripts, a fallen nation that evidenced a vanished civilization, and a nuclear test base that held over 40 detonations. This region was triggered and unsettled by the tension between the West and East throughout over a hundred of years, from Imperialism to the modern era.
James Mitchell praised the 20th century explorers as “Earth Conquerors” in his book titled as so, which inspired Li the name of his zine. The Westerners had changed views and interaction with this land from the colonial age to nowadays, and it is interesting to think about part of its cause: how the relations between cultures had also evolved. To Li, this zine is more of an outline, which always inspiring and need to be unfolded.
