URUKLYN

Flexibound, silkscreen cover
216 × 283 mm
180 pages
Jiazazhi, 2025

Before the age of 18, Ma Hailun was born and raised in Urumqi, Xinjiang. After turning 18, she moved to New York to study fashion photography at the School of Visual Arts in Brooklyn. Despite the vast distance between the two places, Ma finds a fascinating cultural resemblance between them: Brooklyn brings together people from all over the world, creating a rich blend of cultures, while Xinjiang, as a corridor connecting Europe and Asia, also nurtures a diverse and symbiotic way of life.

As witnesses to two important phases of her life, these two cities represent Ma Hailun’s profound and unforgettable memories of growth, which have also directly influenced her later creative work. Using her hometown Xinjiang as an anchor, she documents her homeland through fashion photography, giving rise to the project Uruklyn — a clever combination of “Urumqi” and “Brooklyn”.

Through this project, she hopes to open a new perspective, allowing more people to see the authenticity and diversity of contemporary Xinjiang — not just the postcard-like landscapes, but also the often overlooked yet meaningful fragments of daily life. At the same time, she hopes that native Xinjiang people can rediscover their familiar yet extraordinary homeland through these images.

She also aims to use these visuals as a bridge for communication, allowing people from different backgrounds to meet and exchange ideas, collectively shaping the shared memory and cultural identity of the “Xinjiang people”.

About the photographer

Hailun Ma, born in 1992 in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China, currently lives and works in Shanghai. In 2013, she moved to New York to study photography at the School of Visual Arts, where she earned her Bachelor’s degree in 2017 and her Master’s degree in 2018.

Her creative practice began in the field of fashion photography and gradually evolved into an image-making approach centered on people, identity, and cultural perception. Growing up in an urban environment marked by the juxtaposition of multiple languages, customs, and visual memories, her early observations of clothing textures, family scenes, and street gestures became a lasting perceptual foundation for her visual language.

These cultural backgrounds are not directly visualized as themes, but subtly shape the foundation and trajectory of her way of seeing. Her work blends traditional narratives with contemporary expression, establishing a restrained yet dynamic visual order that lies between documentary and constructed imagery.

She consistently explores themes of identity, female experiences, youth culture, and emotional structures, using images to respond to the complex situations of individuals within cultural contexts while maintaining openness in her visuals and freedom in interpretation.