“As Night Moves Through the Valley”, by Tiya Xu, explores the changing way of life of Kazakh pastoral communities in Xinjiang, where generations-old traditions are increasingly shaped by urbanisation and tourism.
In the mountains of Xinjiang, Kazakh pastoral families have long moved seasonally with their herds, their lives shaped by the rhythms of the land.
Today, that way of life is changing. As younger generations move towards the towns and cities, and villages increasingly adapt to tourism, families find themselves negotiating between an inherited pastoral tradition and an unfamiliar settled future.
Based between London and Shanghai, Tiya Xu is a Chinese photographer whose work explores gender identity, the human body, and the female gaze. Blending documentary and fashion, her photography captures intimate moments of vulnerability, growth, and transformation through visual language that is both poetic and instructive.
As Night Moves Through the Valley, her ongoing project, explores the condition of Kazakh and other ethnic minority communities in China within the context of urbanisation. It began with “a curiosity about the relationship between Han Chinese and minority communities, and an awareness of her own distance,” prompting Xu to go to Xinjiang, the autonomous territory in northwest China, to try to understand more.
T.Xu: Growing up in an urban Han context, my understanding of minority cultures was limited and often shaped by mediated images and forms of cultural consumption. Living with a Kazakh nomadic family in Qiongkushitai, a small village in Xinjiang. I began to encounter a way of life that both challenged and unsettled these assumptions.
T.Xu: The family I stayed with has practiced pastoralism for generations. In recent years, like many others in the village, they have begun to move between two distinct modes of life: seasonal herding in the mountains and settled living in the nearby county town.
T.Xu: Through their experience, I observed an ongoing negotiation between mobility and stability, tradition and adaptation. The older generation, who speak only Kazakh, remain committed to herding, while the younger generation, who’s been educated in Mandarin and exposed to urban life through TikTok and Han’s tourists, seek alternative livelihoods in tourism, service industries, or migration to cities.
T.Xu: Moving between remote grazing areas and the county town, the work traces this transformation through everyday details: guesthouses built beside former sheep pens, remnants of yurts constructed for tourists, and the worn skin of horses marked by the physical demands of herding and migration from day to night.
T.Xu: Alongside the conveniences brought by settlement, new forms of precarity emerge: debt, unfamiliar financial systems, and unequal access to healthcare and education. These conditions take on forms that were either absent or fundamentally different within earlier nomadic life.
All images © Tiya Xu