Home is what you make it: Yuhan Cheng’s photo diary reinvents belonging

In the song The City by The Dismemberment Plan, the quintessentially Gen X indie rock group condensed the fears and anxieties of twenty-somethings at the turn of the millennium in their lyrics: “This is where I live, but I’ve never felt less at home.” It turns out that this feeling is universal, and still very much felt in the day of the zoomer as Yuhan Cheng demonstrates with vibrant colours in their new photobook aptly titled Room 房间. To Yuhan, neither photography nor home is permanent; the common thread is that both are transient and ephemeral. One decays and withers over time, and the latter is a floating concept – at least to Yuhan, who fled their hometown of Chengdu at 18, only to discover a lost-yet-found sense of home in New York. The photographer’s debut photobook carefully gathers those memories that they’ve built over time in New York, sealing them inside the plastic negative.

To open the book is to open the door to Yuhan’s first room in the city, an old space nestled in Alphabet City, East Village. In the sprawling chaos of New York, where it’s easy to feel adrift, Yuhan recounts finding a sense of belonging, something they could newly linger in, having trailed away from their family early on. “Growing up queer in a military household made me isolate myself from my family early on. That led to a kind of detachment as I grew up and left,” Yuhan says. “When I think about home, I think about Chengdu, where my family still lives. But as time goes by, and the longer I’ve stayed elsewhere by myself, I think less of home as a place I must return to. It has become more about where I feel present and comfortable now.”

The fleeting yet visceral memories Yuhan shared with people they met and the places they came to root in are captured in the dusky, softly fading tones of Kodak Portra 400 and Ultramax. When night fell, Yuhan would turn their room into a darkroom by blocking the two windows by the bed. For this photobook, they processed and enlarged everything from the scans of their self-portraits, destroyed prints, their tablecloth, hands, notebook, and the old keys to their first home. The eclectic mix of black-and-white and colour photos here take the viewer on a journey through alien worlds, skewed angles and warm interiors. From severed wings to ethereal waterfalls cascading into darkness, intimate narratives of disembodiment, spirituality and acceptance are created through striking symbology.

Moving aside obvious comparisons to Wong Kar-Wai’s gorgeous images, we can see Cheng Yuhan is in a league of their own, with not just inspirations ranging from Nan Goldin to manga, but the more abstract concepts of smallness in such a large world. The photobook is just another room Yuhan has built for themselves—only this room holds onto the memories a little longer. In this space, Yuhan no longer feels the need to leave. Here, they can revisit, stay, and relive the moments. “The memories that are trapped in the room got trapped in the images too,” Yuhan says. “I store them in this room that are no longer temporary. In the images, the book of mine. A room of my own, that I built.”