This reportage was taken in the rural villages of Fujian, China, where there’s a quiet pulse that beats away from the noise of cities and industrial progress. It's not made of engines or voices, but of silence, plastic stools, playing cards and the soft buzz of a television set in the corner of a tiled room.
These are the village social clubs – community spaces that once served as halls for parades, dance rehearsals, wedding banquets or loud New Year gatherings. Today, their purpose has changed. As the countryside grows older and many young people leave for the cities, these rooms become a place of routine, comfort, and resistance to isolation.
Most of those who gather are men in their seventies and eighties. They arrive slowly, some with hands behind their backs, others with cigarettes in their mouths, and take their place without speaking. Women come too, often less visible, sitting at the back, watching, mending something quietly. The same soap opera plays every afternoon. The same game of cards, half-competitive, half-therapeutic, unfolds under a single fluorescent bulb.
These spaces are neither nostalgic nor performative. They simply exist – functional, frayed, full of life that is no longer hurried. I photographed them not as exotic remnants of the past, but as active forms of present-day socialization: this is how people in rural China resist loneliness, how they create community without needing to define it.
The photos show what words cannot: the way hands move over the game table, the closeness of bodies not touching, the gaze that lingers on a screen, not for the story, but for the comfort of not being alone.
In an age where speed and productivity are measures of value, these village clubs offer a different rhythm. One of stillness. One of shared time.
