© Yuehan Hao from "Lies in Stopping"

Lies in Stopping by Yuehan Hao is a sensitive and unsettling photographic project that confronts the presence of death within a shaken domestic sphere, using the camera as a means of interacting with loss. In Italian, to photograph is often expressed as immortalare—to make immortal. The term, rooted in mortalis (Latin for “mortal”), paradoxically means to grant permanence, to preserve someone or something beyond the finitude of life itself. This etymological tension becomes central to reading the project: photography both stops time, suspends life, and simultaneously extends it.

© Yuehan Hao from "Lies in Stopping"

© Yuehan Hao from "Lies in Stopping"

© Yuehan Hao from "Lies in Stopping"

The artist chooses to “immortalize” her mother’s illness and passing, turning the camera toward a subject that many prefer to avoid. Death remains traumatic precisely because we fail to justify or rationalize it; forgetting often feels easier than confronting its emptiness. After her mother died of late-stage cancer, the photographer witnessed how family members tried to distance themselves from pain—moving out of the shared home, silencing grief, choosing removal over remembrance. Instead, the artist does the opposite: she decides to give death a face, creating images in which others might see echoes of their own losses.

© Yuehan Hao from "Lies in Stopping"

© Yuehan Hao from "Lies in Stopping"

Lies in Stopping documents not only the mother’s physical decline but also the emotional architecture of relationships reshaped by death. Yuehan Hao attempts to dismantle the barriers that prevent individuals from acknowledging death and its impact on intimacy.

© Yuehan Hao from "Lies in Stopping"

This impulse to resist disappearance is ancient. Across civilizations, some of the first human artifacts ever created are tombs, mounds, and burial sites—solid images erected in memory of the dead. From the Neolithic tumuli to the Egyptian pyramids, from the Etruscan necropolises to the stelae of ancient Mesopotamia, humanity has long manifested its desire to honor grief and preserve it through enduring forms. These monuments function as early “photographs”: anchors against oblivion, attempts to stabilize memory where life has dissolved. Hao’s use of photography resonates with this human gesture—transforming absence into form, silence into trace.

© Yuehan Hao from "Lies in Stopping"

The mind records what it sees—joy, sorrow, decay. Pain settles within us, stored in the drawers of the unconscious, not buried but lingering like an unacknowledged shadow. To observe pain, to document it, to fragment it into images that can later be reassembled, is an act of courage. It means confronting fear, facing our own shadows and those of others, recognizing ourselves within them. These shadows persist, knocking on our inner door until we choose to open it, allowing grief to emerge and eventually be released.

© Yuehan Hao from "Lies in Stopping"

Lies in Stopping creates a visual space for dialogue and, ultimately, proposes photography as a healing practice—capable of transforming trauma into a constructive possibility of reconciliation.

Yuehan Hao (website)