Journey To The West gathers thirty-two photographs by Wei Jian Chan, published by Setanta Books in 2025 as a first edition hardback of sixty pages. The title borrows from the Ming-dynasty account of the monk Xuanzang, who crossed into the “Western Regions” in search of Buddhist sutras. Chan turns that old narrative of departure and seeking toward his own: in September 2012 he left Singapore for the United Kingdom, and the work drawn from the years that followed is less travelogue than an inquiry into what displacement does to perception.
Chan has described the series as an application of street photography’s formal vocabulary—anonymity, geometry, the structuring of strangers within a frame—to the experience of arriving in an unfamiliar culture and trying to belong. The pictures do not illustrate a biography so much as build a state of mind: figures held at a distance, urban space organized into exacting shapes, the ordinary made slightly unreadable. The sequence of thirty-two images across sixty pages gives that uncertainty a deliberate pace, and the large format—roughly 25 by 33 centimeters—lets the geometry carry weight on the page.
The book sits within a recognizable strand of contemporary British photobook publishing concerned with migration and belonging, but its method is distinct. The testimony stays offstage; the viewer receives structure and interval instead. That restraint, held across a tightly edited selection, is what gives the work its quiet pressure. The publisher’s catalogue lists a limited edition of 750 copies and a separate special edition with prints signed and numbered by Chan; neither the run nor the print edition is claimed here as scarce or as an investment.
For collectors drawn to contemporary street photography that has been turned to psychological ends, this is a considered first edition: a single photographer’s sustained project, issued by a publisher with a focused list. The relevant comparisons are formal and historical rather than market-driven, and the book earns attention on those terms.
