Annie Lai

0:00 Hi, my name is Annie Lai. I'm a fashion photographer. I've lived here for seven years now already.

0:15 I was born in New Zealand in two years after my parents moved there. And we moved back to China when I was two years old. I had and still have a New Zealand passport. So when I was in China, the school time, even though I felt as Chinese as everyone else around me, I was the international student with an English name. And I was sent to New Zealand when I was 15 years old to study high school. I was spending four years with a homeschool family. Even though I was finally in my home country as an Asian girl who didn't speak any English, I was still seen as an international student.

1:00 So the whole project is about my home journey. So please bear with me.

1:08 After I graduated from high school, I applied for fashion photography in London and I got in.

1:15 That's how I ended up here with you guys tonight. The project is very much about the definition of home. When I was, the whole time I was in New Zealand and even a long time after I moved to London, I still consider my home in Shaman where I grew up in China. It's a very small beautiful city by the sea with a warm climate. I have a very strong emotional connection with the place where I grew up with my families and my friends.

1:48 I flew back to Shaman and stayed there for two to three months every year till my mom moved away. Shaman is where I felt rooted. And here are some snapshots I took last year when I went back. People say memory glowed away real moments don't. I always encountered so much complicated emotion whenever I go back home. I naively assumed that my hometown would stay the same as how I remember that.

2:16 But it carried on without the people who left. When I was taking this picture, I wandered around the city in the very few remaining old neighborhoods that I was still familiar with, hoping by capturing them through my camera, they would last longer in my memories. In 2018, I made my last trip to visit my childhood home. My mom was about to move to a small town in New Zealand.

2:38 My childhood home was Buon Sel and both my parents had their new life and new families. My ideas of home was taken away before I could prepare for it. I had a really difficult time coping with it. I felt very overwhelmed because I lost my connection to my past and I didn't know where to turn to.

2:59 After I come back to London from the trip, I was very determined to make this my new home even though I didn't feel belong here then. During the conversation with my Chinese friends, I realized in different ways the struggle of belonging and cultural identities are so common. Most of my friends will come here for university and we want to continue living here after graduation. But being in creative industries, the government policy made it extremely difficult to do so.

3:31 Among every conversation between my Asian friends and me, the topic of visas always get brought up eventually. I'm on my third visa now. We are at this awkward position that we will race with one culture and enter a completely different society at the coming of age when we're just about to start understanding the meaning of representation and identity. We can't return to where we come from yet. We are really far away from fully embracing this new world.

4:03 I started this project in between as a mean to reach out to the women around me who I felt resonated with. I see a little bit of myself in them and also the other way around. All the women in this project are Chinese diasporas in London. I take portraits of them at their home, at their temporary home in London where they feel relaxed and most like themselves. But invited to their place, I was given a momentary privilege of trust to glimpse at the fragments of their lives that intersect with mine. Home is supposed to be where you go back to at the end of the day to rest and so often the little confined space is also the world we create for ourselves to protect us from everything else.

4:49 I was really fascinated to see how different yet similar everyone's places are and how their characteristics show through the interior environments. Trending as a fashion photographer, I was very used to work on a certain schedule and with the team for this project. When the full control is only up to me and the woman in the pictures, I wasn't sure what kind of direction that I wanted for. At the beginning of the project, I experimented with different kind of approach. Having the girl pose in a more quirky, voguing way or with more set up, direct flash or having them more dressed up. But after three or four times the times, it just felt more right to leave everything more organic, subtle and intimate like these pictures you see here. I really enjoy shooting in a natural light as much as I can.

5:45 So the process will be very much about the interaction between me and the woman that I photograph. It's almost a therapeutic process for me to connect with others during the conversation and change my perspective on things. Some of the women are my friends and some of them I found through Instagrams. This girl you see here, Chen Xue, she was seen the same university as me. She was a professional model here for a few years before she moved back to China.

6:10 I remember when I went to her place, she opened the door, literally wearing these fluffy pajamas that's bought by her mom and we decided to shoot her in this outfit. After she received this picture no long after, she told me that even though she's been to so many photo shoots, this is the first time that she actually has a picture just about herself, her life and her home.

6:34 I was planning to keep going back to some of these women's place after a while just to document their change and journey on the way but unfortunately a lot of them left London during especially during pandemic and I lost my chance to do that. I've lived in London for seven years now.

6:55 This is the closest to home I can feel. It's weird to think that living in flux is a constant day in life. We say goodbye to our close friends all the time because they have no choice but going back to go to leave the country and we have to go out of our ways spending all the money and making all the effort for our visa. Even after living in a country for a decade, we might still not be qualified enough to make this our home. We are not completely outsiders, we are no immigrants, we are somewhere in between and I think this for me is what this project is about.

7:36 It's about creating a space of the nuance especially in the world when everything is labeled. The nuance is also worth to be seen, to be talked about and to be documented. Everyone who choose to find their new homes have a common. We are seeking for something lacking from where we come from. Here are some later pictures of this series that I took this year and last year. Here I included some of the pictures from my family album.

8:05 This is me in front of the house in New Zealand that I can barely remember and then the picture from my home in China on the balcony and this is me pretend that I could read newspaper with my granddad.

8:27 So I'm showing you these pictures because this is the only memento I have with me from my childhood home and when I look through the album I realize that my mom was such a huge influence on my earlier interest in photography because she was the one that always carrying camera and taking picture of my every moment. Memories are subjective and I think she more or less shaped my memories towards my home and my childhood through these pictures. I feel like for this personal project in between I become the role that my mom played to this woman. I choose and capture the moments for them at their temporary homes and the image would become the little momentum for them in the future as well.

9:11 And lastly I want to quote from my incredible friend Wen Chu who was also one of the women in this project that I photographed. The sentence she said really stayed with me. As we are molding and being molded by our experiences we are constantly seeking a sense of validation and belongingness. This doesn't necessarily have to come from a physical place but anyone and everywhere that we found resonance with. Thank you everyone.