Adventurous woman creates career behind camera

Qiubi finds her niche snapping shots of rural lives, polar excursions, starry nights

Adorning the walls of airport rail links and subway lines in Beijing are thousands of captivating photos. What many may not know is that over 1,000 of these images are credited to a single person: talented photographer Wang Wenyan, better known by her pen name, Qiubi.

Covering a range of subjects — from documentary work and aweinspiring pictures of landscapes to snapshots of wildlife in Antarctica and images from the intriguing realm of astrophotography — her photos showcase her broad interests and remarkable versatility.

"I'm mainly a documentary and Antarctica photographer," Qiubi told China Daily. "Astrophotography is more like a hobby born from my childhood fantasies about the galaxy and cosmos."

Birth of a shutterbug

Born in 1987 in Sanming, Fujian province, Qiubi said that she got her first Canon compact camera, a gift from her father when she was in university. She received her first single-lens reflex camera when she started working for an automobile manufacturer's overseas marketing department in Xiamen, Fujian, after graduating from university in 2008.

She used it to take photos for the company's newsletters.

She worked with the company for four years, during which she met her future husband. They married and moved to Beijing. In order to further study in France, she attended a French training course at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

During a 2013 outing with friends in the capital, she discovered her passion for photography while capturing candid moments of her friends' children with her camera. Impressed by her photos, her friends said it seemed she had a knack for the art.

Their praise didn't surprise Qiubi, who had shown artistic prowess in her younger years. "I used to love and excel in painting during my school days," she said. "I even contemplated studying fine arts for a while."

Still, she was motivated by their encouragement and decided to make something of her gift.

The photos she took of the children led to her receiving her first commercial photography commission. More commissions followed, propelling her from a part-time to a full-time commercial photographer.

"My focus wasn't on typical commercial portraits but on capturing candid, documentary-style family moments," she said.

Her distinct style and artful approach began to attract more attention. In 2014, she received an invitation to document an international company's environmental project in a village nestled at the base of the Qilian Mountains in Gansu province. Immersing herself in the village life for a week, she trained her lens to capture images depicting how modern cooking stoves had transformed the villagers' traditional way of life.

Following the success of the project, she received more commissions from various entities, including corporations, nonprofit organizations and universities, all seeking her photographic expertise for their diverse projects.

These projects, ranging from environmental and biodiversity conservation and agricultural heritage protection to women's empowerment, climate change and sustainable community development, have brought her to remote communities in China and abroad, especially in areas inhabited by many of the country's ethnic groups.