Photographer Luo Xin, better known by his artistic moniker Lahem, was presented the Discovery Award on Sunday at the 9th Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival in Xiamen, East China's Fujian province.

"The artist uses pure photography to explore an individual's strong, intricate ties with their homeland, the city, memory and identity," said the jury. "His work transcends personal experiences and scrutinizes the inevitable cycles and connections between man and nature, life, and death."

Established in 2015, the award aims to discover and elevate Chinese image artists onto the global platform.

Like previous laureates, Lahem was granted a cash prize of 100,000 yuan ($13,994) and he will hold a solo exhibition at next year's French photo festival the Rencontres d'Arles, which co-initiated the Xiamen festival in 2015 with the Three Shadows Photography Art Center in 2015.

Born in a remote Hakka village called Sibei in Ningdu county, East China's Jiangxi province in 1984, Lahem spent most of his youth trying to flee his backwater hometown.

At the age of 13, Lahem abandoned his birth name Luo Fuping and renamed himself Luo Xin as he was given an opportunity to study at a high school in a nearby county town. He studied hard and secured a place at the prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai, majoring in literature.

At university, the young adult found it hard to reconcile the two sides of his identity — one as a farmer's son and the other as a new urbane intellectual.

"I'd grown up in one of the most impoverished areas in China, but my transformative years were spent in Shanghai — one of its most prosperous cities. I wasn't taught how to deal with that transition. Photography became a way for me to explore my discomfort," said Lahem in an interview in 2021 with Sixth Tone, an online English-language media portal.

Starting from 2013, Lahem focused his lens on his relationship with his hometown and created several projects that Joanna Fu, curator of Modernity's Fracture: The Odyssey of Returning Hometown, Lahem's winning exhibition at Jimei x Arles, termed as a Hometown Trilogy that comprises Lost, Return to Hometown, and Luo Fuping.

In the Lost series, Lahem draws a parallel between himself and the image of grass uprooted from its natural soil and then placed on concrete. Through this metaphor, he explores his connection and memories associated with Sibei and his family.

To create the Return to Hometown series, Lahem spent around two months in 2015 hiking more than 1,000 kilometers from Shanghai to his birthplace. On the journey, he placed one photo from his past creations every other kilometer to mount an exhibition spanning 1,000 kilometers.

"This act of physically traveling between his urban life and his rural origins represents a bridge or spiritual path, connecting his present life with his past," the curator commented.

In Lahem's best-known series Luo Fuping, which was compiled into a critically-acclaimed eponymous book in 2019, he was dressed in a black suit but barefooted, posing at different corners of his home village. This series explores the artist's fractured identities and his attempt to come to terms with them.

"I felt at ease with myself after the project. I no longer resist my past, and accept who I am and what the village is now. I try to make myself whole," he told Sixth Tone.

Unlike his Hometown Trilogy that explores the "intricate duality between the individual and the hometown", according to the curator, the work of the winning exhibition shifts its focus from Lahem to Sibei, a centuries-old village bearing witness to the ebb and flow of nature and life, and positions the artist "within a shared destiny with the land, mountains, and villagers, collectively confronting the scrutiny of nature's laws".

Lahem's exhibit at the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, which encompasses 32 exhibits, runs until Jan 21, 2024.

If you go:

Ticket price: 80 yuan ($11.2)

9:30-17:30, Tuesday to Sunday, Jimei Art Center, Building 12, Xinglinwan Business Center, Jimei district, Xiamen city, Fujian province.