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Under the Well

First encounter with the crippled elderly man.

Under the Well

Ang LiPorAng Li
2 de julho de 2025
em Portfólio

Selecionado no Prêmio Portfólio FotoDoc 2025

This photograph is part of my documentary photography series Under the Well, created in 2018 in Laojing Village, a remote community in Shanxi Province, China. Once known as the filming location of a popular 1980s Chinese movie, Laojing remained untouched by the country’s rapid development. When I arrived, most households still lived without electricity or running water. Their daily struggles—quiet, continuous, and invisible—were unimaginable to someone like me, living in a modern, convenience-filled world.

This series documents the villagers’ everyday lives in 2018, focusing on a few characters: a crippled elderly man reading his beloved literature book, a blind man who, with no family or carer, learned to care for himself, and a group of workers laboring to dig gutters for the village.

On my first day there, I met the crippled elderly man sitting on a millstone, absorbed in his book. We started talking, and he told me about his life and the hardships of the village. At first shy, he later agreed to be photographed.

Without a medical facility nearby, he endured a two-hour truck ride to the nearest town for any treatment. His home was a shabby bungalow without electricity or running water. Every other day, he hauled heavy buckets from a communal tap to fill his water tank—an exhausting task made even harder by his disability.

In Chinese, Laojing means “old well.” But it’s not the villagers who are trapped at the bottom— it’s those of us blinded by mainstream narratives, ignorant of realities beyond our own. Under the Well is my attempt to listen, witness, and quietly share these overlooked lives, held between resilience and hardship.

The blind man at home in the middle of the day.
The blind man at home in the middle of the day.
The blind man was cooking by himself with a traditional stove.
Two villagers were sitting in front of the village chatting.
Commuters were coming back together from their work in the town nearby.
Villagers were working together to dig a gutter for the village.

The crippled man invited me to his home and cooked for me. He was collecting firewood for the cooking.

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Ang Li

Ang Li

Ang is a documentary filmmaker and photographer born in China and based in London. Ang got his first camera in 2015 when he entered university. Even though he was studying Computer Science, his passion for visual storytelling made him decide to change his major to Communication Study. After Covid, Ang came to London and gained his Master degree of Fine Art in Creative Documentary by Practice from University College London (UCL). Since then, Ang’s film and photography projects have been recognised and exhibited in international galleries, BIFA-qualifying film festivals like Brighton Rocks International Film Festival, and BAFTA-qualifying film festivals like Sheffield DocFest and Visions du Réel. His latest documentary film I Had Sex, But... (2025) just won the Best Documentary Short at the BIFA qualifying Brighton Rocks International Film Festival 2025. Ang’s work, no matter how it appears or what its medium is, is always about questioning the relationships between human beings’ consciousness, behaviours and interactions of their surroundings. He constantly challenges authority, normality, and the “quiet desperation” by finding inspiration from the surreal details in life. Through his subtle yet powerful work, Ang wants to invite everyone on the reflective and emotional journey to find and celebrate their ignored inherent sparkles. Ang believes that every art work is a reflection of the artist themselves. He thinks that it is not the lens or camera that composes the world or the art, but the artist’s eye.

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