Tibetan dream chaser

Portrait of the artist: On the road less traveled.

Rather than helping, the altitude of the Tibetan plateau posed more of a health risk. But Shen didn't care. He just wanted to follow his dream, and ended up documenting the dying traditions and industrial development being wrought on this exotic land.

His prized possessions include a sheaf of paper money the size of a postcard that dates back to the 1930s, when it was worth 25 grams of gold.

He admits that the emotional and physical content of his pictures?outweighs his technical skill, which he began nurturing in college and improved with the aid of local teachers during his four-year odyssey.

The time he spent in the remote hinterlands of this ethnically diverse part of China gave him privileged, even unique, access to the temples, mud-built villages, locals and their customs, he says.

His anecdotes are rich, but mining them from the guileless young adventurer requires a degree of patience.

After two hours of chit chat, he speaks of circumnavigating by foot an ice mountain studded with stalagmites as part of a local Buddhist ritual, photographing cranes tearing up valleys, and being chased by wild wolves near the base of Mount Qomolangma — escaping only after pelting them with rocks.

"I would have used my tripod but the rest of my group had run off and taken all my equipment," he says.

The photo of the faceless woman on the plains was shot on a Fujifilm X-Pro 1 digital camera using a wide-angle Zeiss 25mm F2.8 lens.

It was chosen as the centerpiece of the exhibition because it highlights how easily the public can be deceived these days by counterfeit products and images, according to the organizers. After all, the subject in the photo is only posing as a Tibetan.

"Society is full of businesses trying to trick us," says Xiao Wuling, one of the organizers at Lohaus.

"They show us images of remodeled buildings, and it's like they are creating a new Tibet for us, but it's not the real or old Tibet. Even in Shanghai, there is too much focus on reproducing Western elements, for example at restaurants, while paying too little attention to the beauty of our own culture."

"It was Shen's pure character that enabled him to take these photos," she adds. "Sometimes you need that innocence to see through all the superficiality."

It also highlights another important message: how it is possible to follow your dreams and achieve at least a modicum of success despite not having all the technical training, financial backing or other ingredients usually considered essential.

National Geographic China contacted Shen after finding some of his shots of the night sky in Tibet on local microblogs. It was impressed by their artistry, but took some convincing before accepting that they were free of digital manipulation.

Shen says he is only interested in photographing Tibet and its neighboring provinces. That is his dream. To encourage others to follow suit, he asks visitors at his exhibition to write their own dreams on the postcards provided.

He will mail them back to their authors later this month from Tibet. He is returning there to work on a project on endangered species commissioned by Beijing's Tsinghua University.

"After college, most people I know forgot about their dreams and became obsessed with real estate and cars," he says.

"The point is to remind them that if I can do it, so can they."