wû sín 有神 | Photography by Lin Shu

Faith within everyday life stands apart from the layered meanings and historical frameworks that scholars tend to emphasise. It is concrete and fragmentary, diverse in its forms, and though it has rules of its own making, it is often loose in principle. In the hometown of photographer Lin Shu, the desire for faith has long been deeply woven into the rhythms of daily activities such as eating, drinking and sleeping. Though seemingly entirely ordinary practices, with an elevation of spirit that is hard to put into words and a faint mysteriousness, they tint ordinary time with a distinctive undertone.

From 2020 onwards, Lin Shu took up his camera and turned his gaze back to his hometown, Fujian. In this period of repeated uncertainty and unexpected interruption, he let go of preconceptions and plans and faced his subjects through direct photographic expression. In the instant of releasing the shutter he captures moments already passing, taking on the act of looking back at the past as self-reflection in the present. For him, who had long been away from his hometown and once wished to escape it, home now appears as something without fixed contours. From the small deity images quietly enshrined in a dim little shrine on a mountaintop, which as a child he could not look at directly, he senses an expanse beyond cognition. And through the character of Fujian folk belief — "people and gods live together, and spirits dwell in all things" — he comes to know anew that his hometown has quietly shaped him.

The book's editor, Yida, is also from Fujian and shares the same background as Lin Shu. She turns her attention to the dialect the two have in common. It is an old language still alive in people's spiritual lives — in the singing of folk songs and in the rituals of folk belief — and it retains a vigorous vitality. Selected words and sentences are inserted between the photographs without directly corresponding in meaning. Even so, the two quietly resonate with each other on a deeper level.

Publisher: Yanshu 鼴書
Publication year: 2025
Dimensions: 500 × 365 mm

Wu Sin / Contemporary Art / Art Monograph