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Unable to travel due to the Corona pandemic, Feng Li participated in his first residency program in Aranya, a seaside city near Beijing, in May 2021. Shortly after the end of his month-long stay, Feng Li had over 400 photographs to share with his publisher, which have now been edited down into “Ocean Flame,” one of Feng Li’s most accomplished works.

Aranya, a strange place to begin with, transforms into a multi-elemental stage of a surreal otherworld, peopled with characters who seem strangely off yet charismatic and permeated by an atmosphere of decadence, leisure, loss and cruel brittleness. Almost every single picture in “Ocean Flame” is some kind of noteworthy event, which add together to form a 264-page long journey into a surreal world of unspoken agreements, invisible threats and concealed performances.