24 Mails from the Railways

On December 1, 2019, Chinese artist Cheng Xinhao departed from his hometown of Kunming, embarking on a walk along the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway to Vietnam. This 465-kilometer journey, which he estimated in the first email of his book would take between 25 days to a month, depending on his physical condition and potential encounters along the way, was ultimately completed in just 19 days.

Cheng Xinhao documented this journey through photography. In each photograph, we see two constant elements: him and the railway tracks, which served as unwavering companions throughout his trip. However, the surrounding landscape, weather, time, flora and fauna, and the people he met constantly changed. For every kilometer he walked, he picked up a small piece of ballast from the railway and placed it into his backpack; by the last day, his backpack carried twenty kilograms of railway gravel. Each chapter in the book marks a day's walk, recording the starting and ending points, the kilometers covered, and the date. At the end of each day, Cheng Xinhao would write a letter to a fictional friend, X, sharing his journey.

Through these letters, we learn about the motivations behind his journey, his intimate connection with the region and its railway, his hopes, his understanding of the region's history, the colonial history of the countries in this region, the modernization process of mountainous areas in Southeast Asia, his childhood memories, and the encounters and observations he made along the way. The true power of this book lies in its meditative quality, the interplay of repetition and change in the images, and the solemn and introspective tone of Cheng Xinhao's words.

"An ocean! A railway leading to an ocean! Can you imagine? Those lights twinkling in the darkness will eventually lead to an ocean! What does this mean to a child living in an inland mountainous area? From then on, my perception of the ocean became closely intertwined with this railway. To imagine the ocean through the railway. This idea still puts me in a self-hypnotic state of excitement. Is this feeling kitsch? I don't know. But this is where I come from, and this is what defines me." — From Cheng Xinhao's second letter (2019.11.28)