Jiatong Lu was born as the second daughter to her family in 1988 in China. Under the one child policy, this made her birth illegal. Her parents sent her into hiding with her grandparents, who raised her for the first two years of her life. “I formed a strong relationship with my grandfather,” says Lu, who continued to visit her grandparents even after she returned home. “I still cherish those memories.”

Over the years, distance meant they saw one another less frequently. “As I grew up, I realized that the two forced separations—one with my mother when I was born, and the other one with my grandfather—really affected me and shaped who I am,” says Lu.

Growing up, life at home was tumultuous. Lu’s mother and older sister physically abused her when she was a child, and continued to emotionally mistreat her for most of her adult life. It wasn’t until she was 32, when she was living in New York in a healthy and loving relationship with her current partner, that she realized her childhood experiences were far from normal. “What my family did to me was completely toxic and wrong,” the photographer, who is now 36, reflects. “The reason I didn’t notice was because in the environment and culture where I grew up, most people don’t consider beating their own children as physical abuse. Instead, they prefer to view it as ‘physical punishment.’”

In her project The Secret Place with Nowhere to Hide, Lu revisits these childhood memories to heal the wounds of her past. “I had been experiencing feelings of depression and anxiety my whole life, but during the pandemic everything intensified,” she says. In 2020, Lu made the difficult decision to cut ties with her family. “I needed the space to heal. As a child, I was definitely very sad and hurt, but I couldn’t understand what happened… This is a journey of healing. Through this project I’m trying to internalize my childhood trauma and the broken relationships that came out of it.”

The project began with an image of her grandfather, taken on their last meeting in 2015 shortly before he passed away. “I didn’t know how to process my feelings, so I started to work on this photograph,” says Lu, who spliced the photo against a peaceful backdrop of a lake near her current home in Hudson Valley, New York. The photographer found peace in creating this image, so she continued, alongside reading psychology books about trauma and healing. “The process of creation was definitely emotional and painful, especially when I have to recall old memories that I hide deep in myself,” she says.

The outcome mixes quiet, emotionally-charged ‘straight’ photographs with more layered compositions; a picture burnt, curling at the edges, an archival portrait of the artist as a child, superimposed with dappled light and tree branches. In another key image, we see Lu hunched over as a beam of light illuminates the centre of her body. “Every time my mother or older sister was going to beat me, or whenever I felt emotions of uncontrollable rage or isolation, I locked myself in my bedroom. I could always see a stream of light on my face or body, and hear them yelling outside the door, or laughing outside,” she recalls. “That is one of the most traumatic memories from my life.”

Then, in 2021, Lu began to develop a series of alarming symptoms: severe fatigue, joint pain, insomnia and overwhelming depression and anxiety. She was diagnosed with Neurological Lyme disease, a bacterial infection that can be spread to humans by infected ticks. After a year of battling symptoms, she started a new project Nowhere Land, about the epidemic of tick-borne illnesses in the US. Her family in China saw the project online.

“We started to rebuild a connection, and my older sister sincerely apologized to me,” says Lu. “My mother is a very typical, Asian parent. She wanted me to live the life she expected and unconsciously tried to control me in many ways. Now, she only cares about my health… I never expected our relationship to get better… I felt so relieved.”

In the end, photography aided Lu’s healing, becoming both a refuge and a space to explore difficult experiences. Across her projects, it has become a tool to tend to and examine the unseen, helping her reconnect not just with others but also herself. “The creative process allows me to delve into my inner self and explore the relationship between myself and the external world,” she says “Now, I can feel my growth—my temporary peace, finally.”

Editor’s note: Jiatong Lu won first prize in the Singles category of the LensCulture Art Photography Awards 2024.