Picture portraits in rural settings

Since late January, in the entrance hall of the British Library, photo portraits have been displayed of Chinese faces in different rural British settings.

It's due to a photography project commissioned alongside the library's exhibition, Chinese and British, which sheds light on individuals in the Chinese community in the United Kingdom since the late 17th century.

While most Chinese British in the UK are based in cities, these photos taken by Jamie Lau focus on individuals of Chinese heritage who feel connected to countryside life, so as to provide a different perspective of looking at rural Britain, as well as another way of finding one's identity.

There are altogether eight photos of ethnic Chinese in different professions, including an artist, a horse rider, and a priest. All are standing against green backdrops of bushes, woods, hills and ponds — the common natural landscapes one often finds when venturing out of cities.

Each portrait also has a short story telling how the person forged an identity away from metropolitan life, thus giving the title of the photo show — 8 Stories.

Lau is Chinese British, born in London but grew up in a village in Bedfordshire.

"With no extended Chinese community in the area, far from feeling culturally isolated, I felt no different from everyone around me," Lau says.

For Lau, the countryside is a concept of "being able to walk through nature", and a "different pace of living". "I used to walk from one village to another when I was a kid, just at night through the woods, and you'll be walking in the moonlight, and it felt different," he recalls.

But living in the countryside is also not all that romantic, Lau says, adding that village culture is in some respect not very friendly to outsiders — "you have to fight to be included".

For Angela Hui, one of the people in Lau's portraits who grew up in a Chinese takeaway in rural Wales but has lived in London for a decade, the countryside evokes the Welsh word hiraeth that conveys a missing feeling of something irretrievably lost and a place of comfort that one always wants to return to.

"I took the beautifully bleak abandoned coal mines and the lush rolling hills that were on my doorstep for granted. I constantly crave corned beef pasties, I long for Welsh folks to stop and natter to me in the street and I miss being able to spot sheep in the distance," she says in her story with her portrait, which features white sheep dotting the green hill grassland.

"That, to me, is the green, green grass of my home," Hui says.

In another portrait, Huang Chinghe, a food writer and host of a TV cooking show, was a farm girl brought up in southern Taiwan and then lived on a farm in South Africa in childhood.

Portrayed as standing in the woods with a basket of vegetables, Huang sees the countryside as a source of energy and inspiration.

"Now, I live in the UK and I adore the long forest walks, and foraging in my local areas rejuvenates me and replenishes my soul," she says.

"Sometimes solutions to challenges I'm trying to solve find their way into my consciousness. I do feel as if all the answers can be found in nature."