Artist Interview with ZHOU Yang

‘Humanscape’ Through the Lens

Tianjin land reclamation project was virtually ‘absent’ from Hu Yue’s childhood memories. After studying in the UK, she returned to her hometown’s coastline, using photography as a tool for understanding, and spent four years exploring this reshaped landscape. Her project, ‘Humanscape’, combines aerial drone photography, microscopic imagery and cyanotype techniques, creating a tension between the macro and the micro, and between objective measurement and subjective experience. This is not merely a visual endeavour, but a philosophical inquiry into man-made landscapes— how is a landscape defined? What layers of emotion and memory lie hidden beneath the traces of human activity? Through her lens, the landscape ceases to be a passive object of contemplation and becomes a vibrant arena for an ongoing dialogue between the body, technology and the land.

Original essay is published at Photographers’ Companion Magazine (摄影之友), February, 2026, pp. 78–81. This introduction is translated by DeepL from Chinese mandarin.