Hailun Ma, born in 1992 in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China, is a photographer living and working in Shanghai. As a child, she knew the traditional path was a doctor, professor, lawyer—“the perfect answer as an Asian kid,” she says, but she wanted to be an artist. During high school, her family got a digital camera, and she fell in love with photography. Ma completed both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York. We featured her project “Uruklyn,” in which she creates a new vision of her native Xinjiang inspired by her time in New York.
