Yamano Chōmei, a reclusive hermit of ancient Japan, dwelled in a grass-hut barely ten-feet square. Looking back on the people and events of his lifetime, he once wrote in clear and pure prose: In spring I behold wisteria blooms, like a purple cloud spanning the sky; in summer I hear the cuckoo’s call, my life’s compass; in autumn I listen to old cicadas, and know the sufferings of mortal life; in winter I gaze upon white snow, which accumulates then melts away, like the karmic transgressions of my own life…

From Liu Chuan to Liu Zhenjie, four generations of one family span nearly a century. Images accumulate and fade away, and such is what we witness.

Liu Chuan, my grandfather, whom I never met. His life story and dates of birth and death are family secrets. My grandmother and my parents never uttered a word about him their whole lives. It was not until I reached middle age that I saw one portrait of him, his features gentle in the photograph. On the reverse of another picture he took of my father, then barely six-months-old, there are elegant handwritten notes in his script.

Liu Yuhua, my father, born in 1946. Fond of photography at a time when cameras were rare, this skill lifted him from being a young lathe-operator in a county-town factory to a cultural official at a local mass-art centre. Later he was recruited as one of the first journalists for the provincial television station, and our family moved from the countryside to the city.

I am Liu Jinxun, born in 1971. Influenced by my father, I took up photography. After graduating from university in the 1990s, amid the feverish “go-into-business” boom, I opened a wedding-photography studio. Ten years later the studio folded. I then worked as a freelance photographer, calling it “artistic creation”, yet in truth it became my last line of defence for repeated self-healing.

Liu Zhenjie, my son, born in 2001. His generation grew up amid fiercely competitive childhood and adolescent years. Upon graduating from university, they stand at a dividing line: on one side lies the thousand-year-old order of human division of labour; on the other, a new era of human-AI collaboration ushered in by artificial intelligence. He now works for a foreign-media outlet in Beijing, where the camera has become an essential work tool.

Across four generations: from domestic snapshots of the early Republican era, through documentary propaganda of the Socialist period, to conceptual explorations in contemporary art, and on to global-media practice today. This exhibition is not only a microcosm of nearly a century of folk visual-culture evolution, but also charts the shifting role of photography within a Chinese family.