Velvet Underwater

Velvet Underwater is a staged photographic series concerned with children born through surrogacy in China. Discussions of surrogacy often centre on the practice itself—its ethics and legality, the surrogate, and the intended parents. Yet these debates can leave one person strangely absent: the child who is already here. Once a child has been born, surrogacy is no longer only an abstract question about whether something should happen; it has become the circumstance of an existing life.

To approach this overlooked position, the work constructs an underwater world through a sequence of symbolic objects: a sphere, a glass vessel, a flower, a doll, an empty chair, and a distant human figure. Water functions as a metaphor for a grey zone—something kept out of sight, difficult to acknowledge openly, and suspended between legal and social definitions. The objects gradually suggest the emergence of a life, but they never fully reach the surface. The child is present, yet remains submerged beneath the arguments surrounding the conditions of their birth.

Rather than attempting to decide whether surrogacy is right or wrong, Velvet Underwaterbegins after the event. It asks what changes when attention moves away from the controversy itself and towards the person who must live within its consequences. These children are not evidence within someone else's debate, but individuals with their own needs, identities, and futures.