A.L:
When she writes a letter, I can see her work to orient her body towards a vague shape in her memory. Or, not a shape: a vague set of rules. Up, down. Straight, curved. When she marks the page, I can see her work to keep control, or yield it. The more complex a letter, the more uncertain the hand; a kink, a lesson. There’s a universe of effort to render a W, flip it unwittingly to an M. I take a photograph of her bent K I W I, rendered as M I K I, as proof of her skill and my pride. But I also capture our shared labour in finishing a shopping list, a document of this stretch of time. In this stretch of time, the house is made and remade every day. We wake, make porridge, wash up, brew coffee; we move from room to room, rehearsing the same dramas; we walk to the shops and back. In this stretch of time, the focus is small, local, intense. Today, we write a shopping list then fulfil its imperative. Today, we flip the train puzzle and assemble it from memory. Today, we find a

new route to circle the shops (along the trainline, behind the tennis court, circling our block, past the identical terriers). Today, we stop to discuss the cacti growing according to the shape of a fence. Today, we cannot listen and we decide instead to fight about it. The photograph indexes a small moment in which a letter, a word, comes to live inside a body, eventually able to be registered in a tiny gesture to form a poem, an essay, a letter, a shopping list. It correlates to a small moment in which the world shrank to the size of a freezing cold terrace at the centre of a massive media projection. We take the photo, not the list, with us. We buy everything except turmeric, which we later buy from the spice shop, along with a deck of warm roti, two boxes of pappadums, cumin seeds, and small crystal stickers. I send the picture onwards, proof of a form at the threshold of language. M I K I, spidery, an inscription of an entire body, a work of uncertain art or education.

Genevive Flynn:
I always try to be outside at twilight. It was the incidental outcome of walking home from work, but since lockdown requires no walking ever, it has become a ritual. I leave my home to feel the earth shrink, quiet and small, while the magnificent sky opens up. As if the final sigh of the day has been let out, dark silhouettes are all that surround me. I too sigh into the freshly cool air as the glow of warm windows and streetlight decorate the shadowy streets and the luminous, lively sky celebrates day end above me.

My stressed, anxious mind is one that is lit, like when the sun reaches its height on the stillest, hottest, brightest summer day. The intense sunlight shining straight down. No shadows to take refuge. Hot white light reflecting and refracting, overexposing every detail of my surroundings. This midday frame of mind is hard at work, seeing and responding to everything, kept awake from the light. As a moment in a usual day that passes the midday heat is bearable. But hours, days, or even weeks within this landscape will scorch your senses.

I have lived at midday when I have been faced with an unchangeable thing that I hated. Isolated, locked down and convinced I could change something that I couldn’t. Internally rejecting my circumstances in protest, I never shut down for the night. After days in the sun, I feel myself collapse and be pulled down to the earth, burning in the light.

I think a clear and calm mind is a feeling similar to twilight. Dark on earth but a bright awake sky. Resigning to the reality that many undesired things exist alongside you in many ways is like the sun setting. Sighing as you move on from what you cannot change, you are free to see the spectacular in the world again as night sweeps around you and the sky opens up.

Xiayou Chen:
The worldwide outbreak of COVID-19 has prompted peoplearound the world to wear face masks. In order to prevent thespread of COVID-19 and stop this outbreak, everyone needs towear a mask and do good person-to-person isolation. The reality, however, is that inthe early days of the outbreak, masks were almost universallyrejected in some countries. Lockdowns also largely lifted in the face of local opposition, residents could not bear to be restricted access to life. They connecte with each other online and marched through the streets shouting
"Give me myfreedom" banners, all without masks.
The COVID-19 epidemic has lasted for two years, and residents' awareness and lifestyle have also changed. Everyone wears a mask to prevent infection from othersand from themselves.  When the epidemic is spreading, it is simply putting your life at risk to not wear a mask when you do not know whether the people around you are infected.

Lauren Barlow:

On December 29, 2019, in a subdued state, I woke to the faint sounds of breaking cars and soft horns somewhere in the distance. With shut eyes I took in the sounds and visualised the formation of a traffic line, a sight peculiar for the small beach town of Bermagui. Half asleep, I slowly started to calculate the implications of traffic; it was still dark, and the warm coddling of my bedsheets inferred it was still the very early morning. Sudden footsteps pelting up the pathway overpowered the distant sound of a busy road. A bang on our front door led to a muddled conversation, followed by my older sister pushing urgently into my room.

The night before as we brushed our teeth, we had formulated a plan. In the (high) chance of an evacuation my sister would carry her one-year-old son, Javi, and I would carry her daughter, Rita. Plans became action as we both slipped off our pyjamas and pulled on the nearest, comfortable-but-decent items of clothing. Suppressing my brewing fear, I calmly moved to Rita’s bed and I leaned down to pick her up. She was still wearing her Christmas pyjamas and had hold of her bedtime bunny. As I wrapped her little legs around my waist, she stirred and asked me what I was doing.

In the months leading to New Year’s, children along the East Coast of Australia were being exposed to the subtle traumas of a nation-wide emergency. The smoke that filled the skies like a bad mood denied requests to play outside and the nightly news became a chilling lullaby for every household. I observed the growing concern in language used by my niece, as well as the children I taught each day. You could no longer say ‘don’t worry about the fires, it’s grownup stuff’, as at that moment how could anyone, including children, think about anything else?

In 2012, an article in The Conversation [1] introduced us to a word many have now felt, but never knew – solastalgia. Taking its roots from two antithetic Latin words (solari and desolare; one with connotations of comfort; the other pain) simply put, solastalgia means the feeling of homesick when you are still at home. In context, the word is used to describe the pain experienced when one (or many) recognise that a loved home environment is faced with distressing physical threat.  

After a week’s refuge in Canberra, we returned to our home in Bermagui. While the melancholic energy between the adults was unsettling, it was not unexpected. The profoundly distressed and recurring commentary of the fires and their presence from Rita however, was startling. I feared a little girl, at only five years old was feeling solastalgia.

These images were made using a cyanotype process, more commonly known as sun printing. In an attempt to reconcile Rita’s emotional detachment to a place my family spent years building into a home, I used cyanotype as a form of art therapy. Through the process of play, Rita dressed as a butterfly and explored the land surrounding our home, imagining herself as a butterfly safe in her surroundings. We picked flowers to lay over the film and used the same sun that had brought the fires to bring these images to life.

[1] The Age of Solastalgia, 2012 The Conversation.

https://theconversation.com/the-age-of-solastalgia-8337

Fan Shunzan, 2013, How much time does reality give to dreams, Pingyao Photography Festival

Qiuyi Shen:
This picture is one of the series of works by photographer Fan Shunzan. Its name is ‘How much time does reality give to dreams’. The upper part of the picture is a little girl wearing a pink princess dress with a princess crown on her head, and the lower part is a messy toy, an apple falling on the ground and a broken bowl.

Many little girls dream of living in a castle and being a princess. Even if her life is devastated, she will imagine that she is a princess and lives in the castle. Although she fantasises about the world of fairy tales, the reality is shabby. She imagined that her bowl was a utensil used to hold delicious food in her castle, rather than carrying the hope of living. She didn't want to accept the reality of a difficult life, but she had to accept it, had to compromise, and her dream could only be kept in her heart.

Although she wants a fairy-tale life in her heart, the reality is something the little girl has to accept. There are too many facts in life that we do not want to accept but have to accept. For example, the passage of time, the aging of parents, and the loss of memory.

The tree puts down the leaves in the autumn, which hurts its heart, but throughout the winter, it allows the heart to accumulate strength in peace. When spring arrives, ‘hope’ is still there. Temporary gains and losses are not for a lifetime, but a small cold came. If the heart is tired, let it rest. Restoration of the soul is the hope that life will never dry up.

Kaiyu Yang:

When China's COVID-19 started to break out, the whole nation was required to isolated at home and not allowed to enter any public place freely. When this regulation was first implemented, many people did not seriously cooperate. But when more and more people were infected with the virus, people were afraid. They begin to cooperate with the epidemic prevention.

The workers of traditional Chinese medicine wear protective clothing, masks and eye masks. They risk their lives to check the hidden dangers of the virus. They give the people nucleic acid tests one by one to check the carriers of the virus for people's safety. At the beginning, I didn't pay attention to it. Now we are very cautious and pay attention to protective measures, because for the sake of safety, we need to be responsible.

Jiayi Zeng:

Two strangers sit face to face, showing each other the capital they possess without disguise, even though they are only meeting for the first time. The air around them is filled with the awkwardness of not having met each other before and the embarrassment of being confronted with a sales pitch. The scene of a blind date between two people is already uncomfortable enough, while the "matchmaking corner" is even more hellish. Matchmaking corners, located in some Chinese parks, are established for the elderly who hold up plaques with profile of their children. Young people are price-tagged here in stark terms. All their values are re-measured, with income, property and age becoming the dominant factors.

This photograph is selected from Beijing-based photographer, Guo Yingguang's The Bliss Of Conformity, a body of mixed media works that take photography as the main creative medium alongside video, installation and books. The work explores Chinese arranged marriage and non-intimacy between the arranged couple from both perceived and real aspects. Drawing from the intersection of her own experience and contemporary society, Guo combines documentary photography and artistic techniques, trying to challenge stereotypes of female identity in a complex social and cultural perception with a carefully constructed and strongly comparative structure of work.

In response to her reflection on gender differences, Guo anchors her work in the matchmaking corner in the People's Park in Shanghai, capturing a series of portraits of the daily environment of the park’s marriage market and details of matchmaking. Beneath the seemingly calm and peaceful surface are traditional inter-generational relationships, solidified notions of marriage as well as the strong discrimination against ‘leftover women’, , all of which reveal irony and ambivalence.

In China, despite being independent individuals, women are still in a state of oppression when it comes to marriage. A majority of women often have no choice in matters of marriage, and are coerced into it by parents and relatives, especially after the so-called “golden age”—the middle twenties. It is not love but money relationships and conformity to the larger environment that underpin arranged marriage.

Guo uses the medium of photography to deconstruct and reconstruct narratives around resignation, conveying a delicate and rich emotion. The viewers tend to find a sense of anxiety and compassion in the images, perhaps due to a different perspective on this phenomenon, a response to resignation.