Snapping into it with Mo Yi
What separates us from each other and everything else if not perspective? Step into the photographic world of Mo Yi, where everything is an instant unraveling and snapping in a chaotically profound way— a perfect storm of the random and the intentional. Through his lens of blacks, whites, reds, and blues, he invites us to confront the gritty, unfiltered reality of urban life.
Born in Tibet, Mo Yi’s journey into photography was anything but typical. His family’s relocation to the port city of Tianjin in 1982 became the catalyst for his signature style. Armed with a camera, Yi began translating the urban sprawl into monochromatic visuals, using black and white film to capture the strangeness and solitude of his new environment. His work spanned everything from sharp street portraits to blurry shots of feet in motion, reflecting a vision that was raw, introspective, and anything but conventional.
There is just no way to describe his photography without mentioning his signature—black and white. Navigating Tianjin in early ages he started attempting to translate his perspective on it into black and white photographs. His images are ever-changing in form and composition, ranging from classic street style portraiture to blurry snaps of moving feet and even some early examples of selfies from a time that they didn’t even existed. Mo Yi later moved into colour photography, becoming known for the flashes of red that appear in much of his later work. With the introduction of “Scenery with me—a hint of Red” and the aforementioned “Red Streets” (both 2003) mark a significant shift in his style. Yi affixed red film to the camera’s flash, so that the parts of the image closest to the lens are bathed in red, while the backgrounds are drenched in blue. The introduction of color electrifies the work. These images feel brasher, more modern, denser with significance.
You might be thinking, “Haven’t we seen this before? What makes him different?” Sure, his conceptual approach is one thing, but what truly defines Mo Yi is how he exists within his own work. He’s not a passive observer snapping from the sidelines. He’s inside the scene, part of the energy, moving with his camera strapped around his neck, waist, or even back. It’s an instinctual, almost performative process, recalling Jackson Pollock’s action painting. Like Pollock’s brush, Yi’s camera becomes an extension of himself, whirling through the chaos to capture fleeting, unscripted moments of beauty.
Yi’s creative process is pure intuition, capturing random moments without even looking through the viewfinder. Of course this is a product of muscle memory that comes from years of practicing his unique way of photography. Unique is a word that is easy to throw around yet in Yi’s case we’re definitely talking about one of a kind. We’re talking moving the camera around his body, mounting it to his arms or head, even placing it below his waist to capture from the eyes of a stray dog navigating life in the human world—hovering somewhere between conceptual and performative in his own medium.
His unorthodox style, unsurprisingly, wasn’t embraced by everyone. In the 1980s and 1990s, Mo Yi’s work was considered controversial in China. Critics took issue with his melancholic, almost dismal portrayal of urban life. But instead of stepping back, he doubled down. His shots of crowds and lonely figures in the streets of Tianjin weren’t meant to glamorize life but to mirror it—gritty, isolating, and unpredictable. And while others were out there capturing China’s rapid growth through glossy, aspirational lenses, Mo Yi was focused on something deeper: the emotional residue left behind in the cracks.
It’s tempting to call Mo Yi’s work “unique,” but that’s almost an understatement. The man is a full-blown artistic outlaw, pushing the limits of what photography can be. His ability to exist “simultaneously” with his subjects—not just observing them but almost living through them—sets him in a league of his own. In a world where everyone seems desperate to frame reality through filters, Mo Yi is out there breaking the lens, forcing us to see life as it really is. Disjointed. Unpolished. But always captivating.
