The photographer who left China, went back to find herself, and had a painful awakening
Yan Wang Preston, who gave up a medical career when she married a Briton, thought creating an objective portrait of the Yangtze would restore her sense of identity. It didn’t, but spawned a project that won the 2017 Syngenta Photography Award
One of the defining characteristics of being an artist is the desire to explore the more complex elements of your life and the society in which you live. In Yan Wang Preston’s case, her haunting photographs of rural China allow her to make sense of the difficult relationship she has with the country of her birth – a place she left 12 years ago for a life in Britain.
Critical but also filled with sentiment, they have won her numerous accolades, including first prize at last week’s prestigious Syngenta Photography Award. And yet, for all the success she has achieved in her chosen field, Preston came to photography almost by chance.
Raised in Henan province by two doctors, she studied medicine at Fudan University and worked as an anaesthetist at Shanghai’s Huashan Hospital for most of her 20s – and her path in life looked set. But then, in 2002, she met and fell in love with a British mountaineer, Neil Preston, while rock climbing one weekend in Guilin, in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.
When Preston moved to Manchester to be with him in 2005, she left behind not only her country, but her career. It was difficult for her to retrain as a doctor before gaining British citizenship, so, in what must have been a bitter pill to swallow for a highly educated medical professional, she worked as a typist in a bank. Partly to supplement her income, but mainly to provide her with some creative relief, she started accepting small photography commissions – a team photo here, a portrait of someone’s horse there – which grew into part-time work for a local newspaper.
A year later, her images were hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, in London, as part of an exhibition called “Cherish: Chinese Families in Britain”. For any photographer, this would have been an impressive career trajectory, but for a woman with no connections in London and limited knowledge of the British art world, it was astounding.
She is now one of the more respected photographers in Britain, but that hasn’t stopped Preston leading what she describes as a simple life in her new home, in Yorkshire.