Once upon a time, a young American photographer named Rian Dundon moved to China. It was a more optimistic and open time than today, when China seemed to be becoming more like America with each passing year, with more money, more freedom, more everything. Rian didn’t have a lot of money himself, so he didn’t live the fancy expatriate lifestyle in Beijing or Shanghai; he taught English in Changsha, a large city in the interior. He stayed for six years and made an extraordinary body of work documenting ordinary life that was published in the book CHANGSHA in 2012.
I first met Rian at the International Bar on First Avenue in New York City long, long ago. I’d seen the photographs on my metal magnet-board wall when he was workshopping the sequence. I’d traveled with and made photographs alongside him in North China, where his fluent Mandarin made him the translator for me, a native Cantonese speaker! I’d been one of the lucky crowd-funders who received a precious book. And I’d heard bits and pieces of this story over the years, to the point where Rian didn’t want to talk about it any more.

With the passage of time, the work has become a document of what turned out to be a brief moment when it felt like greater transparency and liberalism would accompany greater wealth and power. Alas, that turned out not to be the case as repression, censorship, and surveillance have returned in ever increasing force to contemporary China. So Rian’s photographs are more bittersweet now than when they were made 10-15 years ago, and it was even more poignant that the book, like many of the situations of transgressive freedom depicted in its pages, had become a ghost — fleeting, haunting — gone.

But slowly a thought began forming in my mind. What if … we could help Rian find and rescue those books? I had visions of wading through sewers with flashlights in hand, of knocking on doors in the dead of night with search warrants, of dabbling with the occult, forensic science, and untangling confusing clues and false leads. But in the end we found the books still sealed on their original shipping pallet, deep in a basement in the rural south of France! They hadn’t been disturbed in a decade! No rubber truncheons, fingerprinting, or DNA analysis had been needed. Just some bureaucratic global Covid pandemic era wrangling with shipping companies and their delays. (And, off the record, profuse burning of incense and incantations uttered under the full moon…)

So, at last, we are proud to be offering Rian Dundon’s original CHANGSHA, no longer a long-lost cult classic, but for the FIRST TIME in general distribution! See more images from the book below. –Alan Chin