Yan Wang Preston, Red Circle, 2011

In the new issue of Elephant, British-Chinese artist Yan Wang Preston reflects on her singular practice, and the physical connection to the landscape it entails. This includes her awe-inspiring project Mother River (2010-2014), whereby she photographed the entire 6,211km-long Yangtze River in China. “That punishing way of working—a deliberate reference to the Western, male landscape photographers who colonised China with their cameras—required that I feel the river with my full body first,” she writes of this stirring scene. “At the source … in the thin air of the Tibetan Plateau, I made a red circle of stones in one frozen headwater with my bare hands … In that moment nothing else mattered, only the sense of touching.” Purchase Elephant 46 now to read on.