Axiren

In Hongwan, a village in Yunnan’s Mile City, the Axi people gather for the annual Fire Sacrifice, a ceremony rooted in the Yi community’s reverence for fire. The ritual recalls the discovery of fire and its place in human life. Around it, painted bodies, flames, smoke and the movement of performers transform the village into a charged public space.

The photographs move between close details and the scale of the gathering: pigment traced across a face, a performer stepping through fire, and crowds covering the hillside. These shifts in distance bring the ritual’s physical intensity into view while also showing how it is watched. The painted figures are at once participants in a ceremony and the focus of many spectators’ attention.

Rather than presenting the festival as an untouched survival from the past, the series attends to the ways tradition is enacted in the present. Gesture, costume and fire carry meanings shaped by Axi belief, while the surrounding crowd makes the ceremony a shared public event. The images hold these dimensions together, observing how an inherited ritual continues to take form before both its community and its visitors.