This series of photographs was taken in 2025 in the Great Liangshan Mountains region of Sichuan, China. As an ethnic minority that made a “leap of a thousand years” from a slave society into modernity, the rural life of the Yi people in the Great Liangshan Mountains remains layered with two distinct temporal realms: one rooted in millennia-old subsistence practices, the other shaped by modern civilization. I employed the technique of “masking faces” to convey the mystique of this ethnicity, which also serves as a form of cultural self-preservation.