At a glance
Chinese photographer Hailun Ma brings the vibrant, Gen-Z energy of Xinjiang to Amsterdam, blending high-fashion aesthetics with the traditional textiles and daily rhythms of her home region.
Why go
This is a rare European solo look at Ma’s work, which challenges monolithic perceptions of Xinjiang by focusing on the individual style, creativity, and personal connections of its young residents.
You'll see
Large-scale portraits · Xinjiang street scenes · Traditional Uyghur patterns · Contemporary fashion photography · Cultural motifs from Urumqi
Pace of visit
The exhibition uses a mix of portraiture and street photography that invites a steady walk through the galleries rather than long periods of reading.
Don't miss
Uruklyn: observe how streetwear, regional references and fashion-editorial staging coexist within the same image.
Kashi Youth: look beyond clothing to the gestures, friendships and subtle hierarchies within each group.
The photographs of older relatives and family life, which give the exhibition emotional depth beyond youth and fashion.
Love in Tashkurgan: a series connecting intimacy and personal style with a remote mountain landscape.
The tension between staged and spontaneous images—it is not always evident where one ends and the other begins.
The Hometown photobook, which allows the series to unfold with a different rhythm from the gallery installation.
Artlovers Tip
Pay close attention to the use of color; Ma often matches the vibrant hues of the Xinjiang landscape with the saturated tones of modern sportswear.
Inside the exhibition
Meet the artist
Description
Hometown brings together recent bodies of work exploring the people, relationships and visual cultures of Xinjiang. Rather than treating fashion as something separate from everyday life, Ma uses it to understand how individuals communicate belonging, aspiration and difference.
Her photographs occupy an ambiguous space between documentary and editorial image-making. Some encounters appear immediate and unplanned; others are constructed through clothing, pose and setting. This uncertainty prevents the subjects from being reduced to either sociological evidence or fashion spectacle.
The project is also about returning. After studying photography in New York, Ma reconsidered the region she had once regarded as distant from global creative culture. The confidence with which New Yorkers embraced their different origins encouraged her to look again at Ürümqi and recognise its own intersections of Central Asian, Uyghur, Kazakh, Mongolian and Chinese influences.
The invented word Uruklyn, combining Ürümqi and Brooklyn, captures this layered perspective. It does not suggest that one city should imitate the other; instead, it imagines identity as something produced through exchange, memory and the freedom to belong to more than one cultural world.
Hailun Ma: Hometown
Artlovers relevance
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