When i was born in 1967, our family was half in the city and half in the countryside.footnote¹ My parents had left their respective villages in Shaanxi Province in the 1950s, both moving to the provincial capital, Xi'an. The early 1960s were the famine years, following the Great Leap Forward, and to reduce pressure on supplies, city-dwellers had been urged to move back to the countryside. By that time my father was studying in college, so it was my mother who left, though we three children were all born in Xi'an; my sister is two years older than me, my brother four years younger. By the time I was born, the Cultural Revolution had already started. Everybody advised—and my father agreed—that cities were too chaotic to be safe, plus it would be more convenient looking after little children in their home village. So after we were born, my mother always brought us back to the countryside. We all attended schools in rural areas.

My parents were from two different counties. Initially, we all stayed with my mother. When I was six, my paternal grandmother passed away. My parents couldn't offer much daily help to my grandfather over there, so they decided to send me to keep him company. I stayed with my grandfather for several years on my own, without my sister or brother. Both my elementary school and junior high school were where my grandfather lived. But actually, it was an intermittent separation; I would go back to my mother's from time to time. It was as if I had two homes for those years.

Both my parents came from the central region of Shaanxi Province, which had well-cultivated land and a rich agricultural tradition. Historically its development was much better than the southern or the northern parts of the province. My mother's home was in Jingyang County, about 80 kilometers east of Xi'an; transportation wasn't bad, with direct bus services to the city. The village had some sixty households. My father's home was in a village not far south of Xi'an, in Zhouzhi County, in the foothills of the Qinling Mountains. That village is very big for Shaanxi, with a population of 20,000 by the 1970s—much larger than my mother's family village. The two cultures were very different. To be sure, there were common features and, yes, some kinship factors, but primarily, life in this central Shaanxi region, Guanzhong, is relatively leisured. It is quite unlike the lifestyle in other parts of inland China, such as the provinces of Henan, Shanxi or Hebei. I have had the chance to visit the countryside there on numerous occasions, and I could always sense the difference. Comparatively speaking, people from our Shaanxi are more conservative. In my view this cultural conservatism is mainly due to the fact that Shaanxi did not get embroiled in the wars of China's modern period.

I was in junior high school in 1978 and 1979, but I didn't go to college until 1991, a whole decade later, due to family reasons. My father had studied civil engineering in Xi'an and had already graduated and been assigned a job at the provincial construction-design studio before the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. He stayed there all the time I was living with my grandfather and attending school in the village. Then, in 1981, my father was accidentally killed by gas poisoning. At that time the policy was that the deceased worker's child could fill the employment vacancy, so I took up the position in the design studio and started work with a formal job. I was only fourteen. To begin with I was put in the 'rear supply' department, doing all kinds of chores. But the only thing that really mattered to me was to be able to study. In the dormitory where the unmarried employees lived, the young people all became good friends. We ate together and played together. Many of the others were college graduates, arriving every year once the universities reopened after the Cultural Revolution. From the 1977 class all the way to 1986, the design studio absorbed some of the province's top-ranked students. Many of them were intellectually gifted. They all knew their art history by heart. This was the 1980s; for most people, it was a restless period—everyone had expectations, hopes for the future, for careers, personal life, and so on. That was what the 80s were like. But, in my view, it was also a rather banal period.

I became very interested in the arts while I was at the studio. A wide range of projects were undertaken there, drawing on different disciplines, of which architecture was the closest to art. At the same time, architecture is the most practical of the art forms; it is the combination of art and utility—so people trained in architecture tend to lean either towards artistic or practical directions. But studying architecture gives people unique strengths compared to art-school or film-school training. Students at art school tend to have special talents in one area or another, but they are usually not so well informed or good at conceptual thinking. It is very different for architecture students, who have to study mathematics and other science courses, and as a result, think and argue very logically. Relatively speaking, they are much stronger in intellectual terms.

I never thought of majoring in civil engineering. I initially thought about architecture. I worked very hard to prepare for the college entrance exams—by 1984, I was working mostly on preparing for the special tests for architecture. But then I took up photography in 1986 or 87. I also took up painting, in about 1988.

At the beginning it was mainly due to curiosity, but it was also because I had to decide on a major for my college studies. Architecture had very rigorous entry requirements at the time, so I thought about the fine arts. My friends at the studio all had basic training in painting, so I learned from them and painted together with them, which helped me prepare for art school. But it was highly competitive, getting into a fine-art course, and what I had learned in the studio was far from enough. For me, photography became the only route. Plus I'd already had a camera for several years and had been practising before I started painting. Though I hadn't published any of my photos, I had gathered enough experience. In 1991 I entered the Lu Xun Arts Academy in Shenyang, in the northeast, majoring in photography.