Are people today used to understand the world through fragmentary images? Helpless to investigate, what does a collection of images have to say? Tam Wai Ping tries to realize the interchangeability between image and word. The photographer roamed through Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and China, his lens captured the paces of the peoples in different regions of Asia, and his writing depicted a contemporary landscape of Asia.

Tam spent 14 years (2005-2019) to finish the Life Pilgrimages series which comprises of 52 photographs that tackle the problems of value judgment that Asia has encountered in the process of modernization, i.e., how British colonial policy has tampered with the relationship between Sri Lankans and their land, how Hong Kong has lost her own “shadow” after the 1997 handover, what we can learn about democracy from the elections in Taiwan, how a tribulation has come between tradition and reform in Japan, and what the phenomenon of entertainmentalization means in the process of modernization in China.