In 1991, award-winning film director Tan Pin Pin from Singapore, then 22, went on an 11-week odyssey to photograph China. Tan travelled alone and embedded herself amongst everyday folk in cities and villages. Unwittingly, she photographed a slice of a society on the cusp of seismic change.

The 2,000 negatives were recently rediscovered. They have not been seen outside Singapore. They were presented for the first time in China, thirty-five years later, at Photofairs Shanghai in May 2026

Someday《总有一天》 presents 80 of these rediscovered photographs in four calendar-like displays. Viewers are invited to flip through them, leave fingerprints, creases and folds. As curator Gwen Lee proposed, the traces of handling by the Chinese become part of the work itself.

The photographs themselves are quiet: a kid glares at the camera, young ladies threshing wheat, awkward undergraduates at a school dance. These are not grand historical scenes. They are the small frames through which a young artist was learning to see.

Someday《总有一天》refers to the moment this time capsule is opened by those who were photographed.

Medium: 80 black and white rediscovered photographs taken in 1991, printed on heavyweight Munken paper, organised into four A3 booklets, arranged side by side.