I started this series in 2014 during a four-month artist in residence in the Chinese coastal city-island Xiamen. Instead of focusing on the cultural differences, I wanted to research the things that are universally recognizable: the meaning of friendship and love. I started photographing several young adults, primarily women, and their intimate relationships. I found some of my models in the streets of Xiamen, but most of them at the Xiamen University campus.

Amongst the young women I met, many were in a lesbian relationship. In China gay-sexuality is not illegal anymore but it is still unaccepted by the older generations. None of the young women I photographed are able to speak openly to their parents about their sexual preferences. This is a remarkable contradiction in this fast changing modern China. At this moment, many lesbian women have secret relationships.

Since my first work period in 2014, I have revisited Xiamen several times. Each visit I met up with some of the same young women again, capturing their changes over time. With some of them I built up a closer friendship, which allowed me to photograph them repeatedly. During these encounters I not only attempted to touch upon the intimate moments between my subjects, yet also, upon the proximity between the subjects an myself.

In this ongoing series, four recurring young women are portrayed over time: Haiqing, Linli, Xiaoli, and Liyao. They are all connected through their shared time at the same university. Over the past few years, three of them have moved to Europe—specifically to the Netherlands and Germany—which gave me the opportunity to continue photographing them.

In March 2025, I was able to return to Xiamen for the first time since 2019. Among the people I revisited and photographed was Linli, who is now married and has a two-year-old son.

This body of work weaves together my observations of these fascinating young women and their relationships into a mosaic narrative.