In 1925, Ai Wu set out from his hometown of Chengdu and walked to Kunming. He then kept walking south, eventually making it to Yangon, Myanmar, and eventually Singapore. In 1933, Ai Wu’s first book, Southern Travels, was collected in the Literature Series edited in Shanghai by Ba Jin, turning it into a classic of modern Chinese literature, a must-read for generations of Chinese literary youths.

In 1970, Xiao Quan boarded a green train from Chengdu and traveled to Kunming to see his father. This was the first of his southern travels. The next time he would come to Kunming would be twenty years later, in 1992. This time, he came to photograph artists in their studios to support the work of Lü Peng, who was curating the First Guangzhou Biennial. Xiao Quan’s Southern Travels began with his photography of Yang Liping, and it was Yang Liping who showed him a Yunnan as seen through the eyes of a Yunnanese artist.

Xiao Quan also shoots the mountains of Yunnan. He has photographed big famous ones like Meili Snow Mountain, the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, and Mount Gaoligong, but also some lesser-known ones, like the Wumeng Mountains and the Ailao Mountains. The vastness of these mountains led him to sudden realizations, realizations that changed his entire mindset, opening up a new dimension of wisdom.
Xiao Quan also photographs the Moon over Yunnan. As he captures images of the Moon, so many thousands of miles away, he is engaging in a continuing dialogue with that celestial body. He believes that the fluctuations of the Moon’s appearance coincide with the joys and sorrows of man. In Xiao Quan’s photographic works, from his portraits to the mountains and the Moon, there is always a gentle narrative flow.

In Southern Travels, Ai Wu wrote, “I kept drifting southwest, walking into a foreign land under the setting autumn sun, into unfamiliar territory.” This how the writer chronicled the many shapes of ordinary life he encountered during six years adrift in foreign lands. Xiao Quan’s “Southern Travels” consists of the recollections and inspirations from more than thirty years of encounters with Yunnan, as told through his lens. This chronicle is marked by solemn, sincere humanistic concern, and the filtered lens of its time, as well as free and pure projections of the artist’s own heart. This is a fluid artistic narrative rooted in the local, as well as a representation of the “soul” of photography itself. Xiao Quan’s three decades photographing Yunnan has been like an act of sustained self-cultivation, using a lifetime of sincere emotions to carry himself south, to feel Yunnan, to love it. His “Southern Travels” are the travels of the heart.