Walking Away
步行逃跑
Artist Book
2024 - now
11 x 18.5 cm
40p
Thread-sewn Binding
Walking Away
Walking Away is a photobook made by multimedia artist Song Lu during her art residency on the reclaimed land of Haidian Island. She repeatedly walked along a road leading to the seaside, where the color of green, blue, yellow, black, and white, constituted her entire life before summer arrived. The photobook records leisurely residents, wreckage from accidents, winter fireworks, foggy evenings, local fishing method, as well as traces of plants and insects through photography.
Walking Away is completed in the spring of 2024 before the operation custom closure of the construction of the Hainan Free Trade Port in China.
Walking Away 2
Walking Away 2 is one of the works completed by artist Song Lu in her hometown of Liupanshui, Guizhou, China. Before returning to New York with her U.S. artist visa, she stayed briefly at her parents' home. The photographs of Liupanshui included in the book are taken from her backup hard drive, originally shot in 2018 before she began her MFA in photography in the United States. The children's drawings are from her kindergarten years. In this photobook, she seeks to reconnect with her initial, simple passions and observe her primal state.
Walking Away 3
Walking Away 3 is a fable in images, crafted on New York‘s Roosevelt Island. By merging AI-generated visuals with photographs of the island, Song Lu creates a bridge between the tangible and the intangible. This work navigates the interplay of reality and virtuality, uncovering fragments of truth through AI-generated imagery while seeking traces of life in the face of mortality.
At its core, the project questions: Is the cosmos merely a projection of the human mind?
Walking Away 4
Walking Away 4 is a photobook created by Song Lu during her residency in Idaho.
Unable to remain in one place, she followed a natural instinct toward migration, which continually propelled her forward. At the same time, this movement revealed her longing for adventure in unexpected detours, as well as her need to reflect on and maintain a simple life. The right half of the book features a flipbook animation that captures a bird in flight as it enters the frame. With the bird’s appearance, the story quietly begins.
Walking Away 5
Walking Away 5 unfolds in a state of consciousness suspended within a “non-place.” The book is composed of a series of small square oil pastel drawings created by the artist Song Lu over two months at dusk. Each drawing traces the inner states she perceived during those hours when light faltered and emotions drifted fragmentary flashes of memory, hazy glimpses of the city’s edges, dream residues, and subtle sensations of the body.
Rather than being anchored to any fixed geography, this chapter grows out of her shifting psychological landscape, shaped by movement and self-reconstruction. Through the act of making, she sought to pause the external journey and redirect attention inward toward the delicate shifts within opening a way of seeing closer to what might be called a “topography of the soul.”
Walking Away 6
One year is made of two overlapping winters.
Walking Away 6 tells stories found in the space between these two winters. It is a mix of shared imagination and personal truth, where memories drift through the damp details of life. Following the series’ theme of walking as a way to find an exit, this book tries to see through the fog using echoing imagery. It starts from a winter slide in Brooklyn on the cover, moves through spring, summer, and autumn, and finally returns to winter.
Inside each book is a physical piece of 35mm film shot on December 31, 2025.
