Pure Black #4

Yanyi He’s Night | 2025 is a nocturnal urban photography limited edition series, unfolding in two parts: Night, Part I: Pure Black and Night, Part II: Chaos. Shot on black-and-white film, each body of work approaches the city after dark from a distinct visual and conceptual register, one meditative and restrained, the other fragmented and volatile.

The series began during a bout of insomnia, when Yanyi found himself walking alone through the city streets at night, camera in hand. Echoing Charles Dickens’s own nocturnal wanderings, these solitary walks opened a space of quiet reflection:

“Without people, there is no need to worry about the eyes of others. If you don’t sleep, you don’t need to worry about how long you can’t sleep. Night gives me an inexplicable sense of security; there are no gazes from others, nor that feeling of being exposed under the sunlight, heartsick with anxiety. So later, I began to enjoy wandering through this city at night, especially in places without people.” – Yanyi He

Night, Part I: Pure Black
In Pure Black, Yanyi attempts to capture a night reduced to its most absolute form:

“In my impression, the night should be pure black. But a totally black night does not exist, just as a world of only black and white does not exist. Still, I wanted to try to show a purely black night.” – Yanyi He

Through experimental technique and precise control of exposure, Pure Black approaches the impossible: a photographic meditation on the nonexistence of absolute black, absolute white, and the tension that defines everything in between.

Night, Part II: Chaos
Chaos reflects Yanyi’s meditations on life, self, and the fragile fabric of reality:

“No matter how hard I think about it, I find that everything is meaningless. Everything begins in chaos, and ends in chaos. I look at myself, I am chaos. I look at the world, the world is chaos. Reality is the colour grey, and grey is chaos. We all live in chaos.” – Yanyi He

To evoke this sense of dissolution, Yanyi experimented with oil applied directly to the camera lens, softening the light and diffusing the image. The resulting photographs bear a delicate, hazy grey atmosphere, mirroring his vision of existence itself:

“The soft grey look of the pictures fits the chaos of the world. I was looking for myself in this project, to find reality.”

Night | 2025 is, at its core, a journey into the poetic extremes of the urban night. It is both an exploration of the city after dark and a reflection on the paradoxes of existence, between solitude and exposure, chaos and purity, black and white.

The series may be collected as individual works or curated thematic sets, each forming a distinct constellation within the nocturnal narrative.

Explore the series:
View Night, Part I: Pure Black
View Night, Part II: Chaos

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