In the highlands of Southeast Asia, many ethnic minorities still lead lives deeply rooted in their own traditions.
Some have lived in those mountains for centuries, while others arrived as refugees, fleeing war and revolution from China, Myanmar, Laos, and elsewhere.
Though divided by political borders and shaped by histories of loss and displacement, they continue to speak their languages, wear their garments, farm their land, and believe in their own ways—on nameless hillsides and mountain slopes a thousand meters high.

This project began with a desire to record their faces.
Tradition doesn’t disappear overnight. It crumbles slowly—so slowly that we often don’t even realize it’s gone.
By the time we turn around to look, there may be nothing left.
I have felt this loss within my own culture.
So when I encountered theirs, it wasn’t exoticism I felt first—it was sorrow.

Life in the mountains is simple, inconvenient, and often extremely quiet.
Yet in that silence lies the memory of a life passed down for centuries.
What I saw was not a romanticized “foreign landscape,” but a way in which communities have come to understand and endure the world around them.
I entered their lives carefully, hoping to receive whatever they would offer, just as it was.
Often, the quiet moments of ordinary life spoke louder than any deliberate composition or posed image.

These photographs take the form of a documentary, but I hope they are more than mere records.
This project is both a mourning of what is disappearing, and a quiet attempt to recover a forgotten part of our own inner sensibility.
I do not know when this work will be complete.
But I do know that it continues to give me a reason to keep walking this path.

Autumn 2016
Hakbong Kwon