Ground Without Ground

Ground Without Ground: Where the Land Slowly Disappears The photographer, Yuchen Peng, is 15 years old and based in China. This project reflects his observation of a rural landscape undergoing a gradual and irreversible transformation. The series documents a rural area in Yingshang County, Anhui Province, where long-term underground mining has gradually caused the land to sink. Farmland has vanished into water, leaving homes as isolated structures surrounded by submerged terrain. Hundreds of houses have been affected, and many residents have been relocated, while others remain and continue to live at the margins of this changing landscape. Houses still stand, but no longer function as homes—they have become monuments to a lost way of life. Some residents now travel by boat, fish for a living, and adapt to a place that is no longer fully land. Rather than depicting a sudden catastrophe, this project focuses on a "slow disaster”, showing how environmental change reshapes both the landscape and human life.