ChenXueling
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BALI BUBBLE 2025
"Bali Bubble" is a visual narrative project about summer memories and female wanderers, continuing a long-standing focus on "fluid female identity" and the "emotional resonance of space." By building connections with the subjects, the project captures, through a direct yet poetic lens, moments where urban nomads commune with nature, exploring the relationship between the private and the public, between spatial emotion and female identity.
Through a relaxed photographic approach, it documents women living in Bali—coming from all over the world, they actively choose a light-footed lifestyle, guided by self-awareness yet disciplined and fulfilled, free yet full of uncertainty.The subjects include a British nurse on a six-month solo travel break, a woman taking time off between entrepreneurial ventures, an 18-year-old surfer girl, a Chongqing girl who started traveling right after graduation, a Chinese exchange student in Bali, a girl running an online foreign trade brand with friends, a New Zealand businesswoman who relocates to a new country each year, a solo-traveling South American illustrator, and a close-knit duo from India—they dress freely, talk, and dance in Bali, yet also admit to still facing gender and social constraints back in their hometowns.
These women seem to live with a kind of "conscious happiness"—they work, practice yoga, surf, explore, and cherish themselves. All unresolved questions and future uncertainties are left outside of Bali. Through conversations with these women, the project seeks to reimagine the forms of "freedom": bodies moving between cultures, finding breathing space in the gaze of others and the embrace of nature.
"Bali Bubble" is not just a story about Bali—it is an exploration of possible lifestyles for contemporary youth: balancing freedom and belonging, fluidity and stability, reality and illusion. As one subject said, "I don’t want to pit Bali against city life, nor do I see Bali as a spiritual refuge. To me, it feels more like a consciously chosen way of living—a collective dream.”