Design Free Thursday // Jiadang (Family Stuff) by Huang Qingjun.

For the last ten years, Beijing based photographer, Huang Qingjun, has been traveling to remote regions in China working on a fascinating project titled Jiadang (Family Stuff). Qingjun searches for families who would pose for him with all of their worldly possessions, often in front of their humble homes. Needles to say, all the people he’s chosen for his project have been less than wealthy.

“Most people thought what I was proposing was not normal. When I explained I wanted to set up a photo, that it would involve taking everything out of their house and setting it up outside, that took quite a lot of explaining. But almost all of them… understood the point. They’re not like people from the city, who have so much stuff that if you asked them to do it they’d reply it was too much effort.”

As someone who (now) lives in the western world where material possessions drive much of the society, looking at these images feels like a cold hard slap on the face. Sometimes it takes a project such as this one to remind us all how lucky we really are.

[Photography by Huang Qingjun, via BBC News.]