Scan It: Tale of Three Lands
Whether aware of it or not, her identity was shaped by social media, as Sijia Ma discovered in 2020. In her long-running photography project ‘Scan It: Tale of Three Lands’, the Chinese photographer unravels her experiences of abuse and marginalisation on social media that have befallen her since the Corona outbreak.
The images were made in September 2020 during the peak of the pandemic, during major political unrest in the United States, where Sijia Ma lives. By combining self-portraits with QR codes, she investigates how our identity is linked to social expectations. Ma regards these QR codes – used for scanning, connecting and alternate self-isolation – as a metaphor for the status unequally afforded to her loved ones.
