I started this series in 2014 during a four-month artist in residence in the Chinese coastal city-island Xiamen. Instead of focusing on the cultural differences, I wanted to research the things that are universally recognizable: the meaning of friendship and love. I started photographing several young adults, primarily women, and their intimate relationships. I found some of my models in the streets of Xiamen, but most of them at the Xiamen University campus.
Amongst the young women I met, many were in a lesbian relationship. In China gay-sexuality is not illegal anymore but it is still unaccepted by the older generations. None of the young women I photographed are able to speak openly to their parents about their sexual preferences. This is a remarkable contradiction in this fast changing modern China. At this moment, many lesbian women have secret relationships. With my still life images in the series, I attempt to refer to this hidden and secret female universe.
Since my work period in 2014, I have revisited Xiamen several times. Each visit I met up with some of the same young women again, capturing their changes over time. With some of them I built up a closer friendship, which allowed me to photograph them repeatedly. During these encounters I not only attempted to touch upon the intimate moments between my subjects, yet also, upon the proximity between the subjects an myself.
In this ongoing series four recurring young women are portrayed over time: Haiqing, Linli, Xiaoli and Liyao. They are all connected with each other, since they studied at the same university. Fortuitously in the past years, three of them moved to Europe - to The Netherlands and Germany and the last 3 portraits in the submitted selection were made in The Netherlands, where I am based. In this body of work, my observations of these fascinating young women and their relationships, became part of a mosaic narrative.
In March 2025 I was able to return to Xiamen for the first time since 2019. Among the people I revisited and photographed was Linli, who is now married and has a two-year-old son.
Two months ago I visited Haiqing in Düsseldorf, where she has been living for the past six years. She now lives with her girlfriend, Pan, whom she met at art school in Düsseldorf, where they were in the same year.
Author biography
Sarah Mei Herman holds a BA in Photography from The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, and an MA in Fine Art Photography from London’s Royal College of Art.
Her personal projects explore relationships, intimacy, loneliness, longing, and the human urge for physical proximity, often focusing on the vulnerability of transitory life stages.
Herman’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and festivals such as The National Portrait Gallery, London; The Benaki Museum, Athens; Photo Elysée, Lausanne; Le Château d’Eau, Toulouse; The Jewish History Museum, Amsterdam; and the JIMEI x ARLES International Photo Festival, Xiamen. Her projects have been recognised by a range of prizes, including the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, the Hyères Festival of Fashion and Photography, the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture, and the V&A Parasol Women in Photography Prize. Her work is held in several public and private art collections, and her images have been published by the likes of i-D, The Guardian, Vogue Italia, Foam Magazine, CNN, Paper Journal and Dear Dave.
Herman’s second photo book, Julian & Jonathan, was recently published by the London-based GOST Books. In 2025, Julian & Jonathan was presented in solo exhibitions at Concertgebouw Brugge (Belgium) and GLAZ Festival (Rennes, France), and will be exhibited during the upcoming Les Rencontres d’Arles in a group exhibition curated by the Hamburg Portfolio Review.