About the book 

Uruklyn is an intimate, finely crafted photobook by Shanghai‑based photographer Hailun Ma, offering a rare, unfiltered glimpse into the everyday lives of Xinjiang youth. Through Ma’s quietly observant lens, scenes of motorbike rides, skateboarding, unhurried hours with friends, and even the region’s iconic horseback stunts unfold with disarming ease and familiarity.

Far from the narratives that often shape outside perceptions of the region, Uruklyn highlights a simple truth: young people in Xinjiang dream, play, rebel, belong, and love just as young people do everywhere. Rooted in family and community, they are forming identities that will one day define the next generation.

Ma’s personal, documentary‑style approach transforms these moments into a tender portrait of the place she calls home. Born in Urumqi in 1992, she studied photography and fashion photography at the School of Visual Arts in Brooklyn before returning with a renewed vision of contemporary Xinjiang. Despite the distance between the two places, Ma finds a striking cultural resonance: Brooklyn brings together people from around the world into a vibrant mosaic, while Xinjiang—long a corridor between Europe and Asia—has cultivated its own diverse and interconnected way of life.

Urumqi and Brooklyn, cities that shaped two pivotal chapters of her life, remain deeply significant to Ma and have profoundly influenced her creative path. Rooted in her hometown of Xinjiang, she documents it through a fashion‑photography perspective, giving rise to Uruklyn—a playful merging of “Urumqi” and “Brooklyn.”

With this project, Ma hopes to offer a new vantage point: inviting more people to see the authenticity and diversity of contemporary Xinjiang—not only its postcard landscapes but also the often overlooked yet meaningful textures of daily life. She hopes, too, that those from Xinjiang can rediscover their familiar yet extraordinary home through these images.

Uruklyn brings these influences together in a lyrical visual narrative, reframing a frequently misunderstood region through the eyes of someone who has lived there, left, and returned with clarity, sensitivity, and affection.

About the photographer 

Hailun Ma, born in 1992 in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China, currently lives and works in Shanghai. In 2013, she moved to New York to study photography at the School of Visual Arts, where she earned her Bachelor's degree in 2017 and her Master's degree in 2018. Her creative practice began in the field of fashion photography and gradually evolved into an image-making approach centered on people, identity, and cultural perception. Growing up in an urban environment marked by the juxtaposition of multiple languages, customs, and visual memories, her early observations of clothing textures, family scenes, and street gestures became a lasting perceptual foundation for her visual language. These cultural backgrounds are not directly visualized as themes but subtly shape the foundation and trajectory of her way of seeing.  Her work blends traditional narratives with contemporary expression, establishing a restrained yet dynamie visual order that hes between documentary and constructed imagery. She consistently explores themes of identity, fornale experiences, youth culture, and emotional structures, using images to respond to the complex situations of individuals within cultural contexts while maintaining openness in her visuals and freedom in interpretation.