Zhiyan Liu

Project Statement

“Laoniang” is what I have always called my maternal grandmother.

Until I was seven, I lived with my grandparents. Later, as I began living in different cities and countries, the time I was able to spend with them became increasingly limited. After my grandfather passed away several years ago, I became acutely aware that seeing someone close to you is not something that can be taken for granted or assumed to continue indefinitely. My grandmother is now eighty years old. Whenever I return home, she is always the first person I go to see. This is also where the project began.
Laoniang cannot read or write and has little contact with today’s rapidly changing digital world. After losing her husband, she continued to live according to the routines she knows: checking on the crops, tidying the courtyard, organising things around the house, and keeping her daily life carefully in order. Growing older has not led her to hand over her life entirely to her children, nor has she stopped doing things that others might consider unnecessary at her age.
At first, I understood these actions simply as habits. I sometimes wondered why, at an age when many people are expected to slow down and enjoy life, she still chooses to spend her time and energy on the fields and the small tasks of everyday life.
Gradually, I began to understand that for her, these things are more than labour. They are a wayof maintaining her own rhythm, agency, and independence. Through her, I have also begun to
reconsider how independence and dignity can reside in a person’s ability to continue arranging life according to their own experience and judgement.
This series records moments of work, rest, conversation, solitude, and the ordinary tasks that make up her days. I do not want to reduce her to a symbol of hardship, ageing, or resilience. Instead, I want to preserve something more specific: an eighty-year-old woman who, despite a world that continues to change around her, still lives according to her own rhythm.