Colin Guan

Projects

Pear garden
Senior thesis
Other writing
Photography

In July 2026, with funding from Yunnan University, I was able to conduct two weeks of fieldwork in Yanta Village, Yunnan Province. Most of my time was spent with farmers, ecotourists, and elders in the village’s communally-owned pear garden, though Yanta is a place where the topic of pears is never far away—each household owns an orchard. I’m currently working on an essay which analyzes the communally-owned orchard as an place where latent conflicts between top-down agricultural development plans, villagers’ own suzhi ambitions, and city-dwellers’ fantasies of rural China are made visible in ecological, economic, and political registers.