New York Times, 12 May 2015

By Dave Gershgorn – Q. Sakamaki has lived his life as an outsider. As a Japanese photographer based in New York City since 1986, Mr. Sakamaki has spent nearly the last 30 years far from home, documenting wars, conflict and demonstrations. Even growing up in Japan, he moved from place to place, becoming an outsider in his native land.

Now, Mr. Sakamaki has turned to China’s fringe provinces — Xinjian, Yunnan, Liaoning and others — where his project, “China’s Outer Lands,” catalogs marginalized minority groups that are rapidly becoming strangers in the territories they call home. The work is on display at The Half King in Manhattan until May 24.

“ ‘China’s Outer Lands’ is about people instinctively looking for their own identity, between conformity or originality or autonomy or dependence,” Mr. Sakamaki said. “It’s natural, it’s happening in not only China, it’s everywhere.”

This project is part of a larger, global story Mr. Sakamaki wants to tell. While “China’s Outer Lands” shows the clash between modernity and tradition in China, Mr. Sakamaki says that this conflict, along with wars and migration, has existed in other places and eras, such as during the campaigns of Genghis Khan.

“Behind the scenes, it’s not a romantic story,” he said. “It’s actually more like blood, blood, blood in history. One small change-up of power creates a huge wave of migration, often with new, bloody war. History shows that.”

Chinese development in Xinjiang Province has attracted a rush of Han migrant workers, and Mr. Sakamaki says the native Uighur population, which practices Islam, is being marginalized. The juxtaposition drawn between the Uighur inhabitants of the region and the migrant Han workers is stark.

A Han couple poses in a field, dressed in traditional Western wedding clothes, as newly installed wind turbines tower over the countryside. Other signs of China’s new industrialism dominate the landscape.

But in the same province, the silhouette of a Uighur boy is shown as he looks at the rubble of a demolished building in a Uighur neighborhood. The Chinese government says it is taking down buildings to build earthquake-resistant structures, but Mr. Sakamaki insists the government is posturing.

Mr. Sakamaki works as an outsider, and his photos offer glimpses of indecision and unease.

Mongolian men riding a motorbike fleck an immense field. The face of a polar bear pelt looms before the uniforms of China’s last emperor, Puyi. An unemployed man, close and out of focus, partly obscures high-rise buildings being erected around a memorial square, dedicated to the region’s iron industry.

This work is Japanese in style, Mr. Sakamaki says, and much more personal than traditional photojournalism. He sees China’s struggle for identity within himself and says that while the project takes place in China, the same ideas of independence and conformity are universal.

“Japanese culture is very personal,” he said. “So I felt maybe I put my personality, my identity, my own Japanese history, and also my own identity as a human being, combined.”

Dave Gershgorn is a Lens intern, freelance journalist and photographer based in New York City.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/searching-for-identity-in-chinas-outer-lands/