Life In The Ashes

2020

Photography

Life in the Ashes is a series of photographs explore the complex relationship between wildfires, climate change, and forest regeneration. Inspired or I would say astonished by the 2020 California wildfires, I started researching the role of wildfire in the nutrient circulation and its importance in energy flux. During my field trip in the North California, charred barks, yellow dried leaves, and burnt ground has a strong sense of apocalypse. However, life tends to be tenacious and resilient that cease every possible to survive even adapted to fire. In the redwood forests, the life imbued in ashes grow from black soil, the moisture of fungi covered its symbiosis tree. The death and life appearing together shows the delicate balanced that earth have sustained.

Yet we don’t know when and how will human disrupt, or perhaps already disrupted, this balance, steering us toward an unknown future.

Probably for many Californians, the haunting orange sky remains etched in memory. The light passed through multi-layered dust, reflecting and converging to an unreal orange hue. I can still recall that sky, the orange, from east to west; it mixed the faint scent of fresh wood lingering amidst the smoke.