Daniel Lee Postaer: Mother’s Land
Mother’s Land unfolds as a series of constructed tableaus—unrehearsed moments through which a rapidly changing China of the 2010s comes into view. The book is also the culmination of a deeply personal search: Daniel Lee Postaer’s attempt to reconnect with a missing branch of his own lineage, one severed when his grandparents fled the communist regime more than half a century earlier. They managed to escape with one daughter; another had to be left behind.
Driven by the need to understand this “other side” of his heritage, Postaer settled in China in the early 2000s and returned repeatedly in the latter half of the 2010s, witnessing firsthand the country’s accelerated evolution.
Rendered through wide, densely layered scenes of urban life, Mother’s Land offers an immersive portrait of a nation undergoing dramatic economic and social upheaval. It also reveals a harsher reality: a place that builds without hesitation and destroys with equal indifference, wiping away its own memory in the pursuit of something newer, grander, taller. In this landscape of constant reinvention, contradictions rise to the surface—sleek glass façades of hypermodernity pressed against jagged piles of debris and remnants of what stood before. Time barrels forward so quickly that a single year feels like five, and the marks of Postaer’s earlier experiences seem to dissolve. Only the construction sites, with their exposed rubble, disclose the many strata of what has passed—geological layers that bring fragments of history back into the light.
About the Author
Daniel Lee Postaer is an American visual artist whose work has entered the permanent holdings of major institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, the High Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and Pier 24 Photography. Working primarily with large-format prints, Postaer reflects on his evolving perception of time, the stilling effect of the camera, and the tensions between human experience and the accelerating forces of modern life. His first monograph—featuring photographs made in China between 2014 and 2019—will be published by Deadbeat Club in 2025. From 2014 to 2018, he served as Artist-in-Residence with RiverLA, and his acclaimed work has been presented widely in both solo and group exhibitions around the world. His Boomtown series, focused on San Francisco, was shown in Pier 24’s main gallery as part of the exhibition Looking Forward. Currently, his photographs are featured at the de Young Museum in the group show Boom and Bust: Photographing Northern California.
Before dedicating himself fully to photography, Postaer built a career in global sports marketing and entertainment. He later earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he received the Photography Fellowship (2014–2015). He is an active board member of PhotoAlliance in San Francisco. Postaer now lives and works in Los Angeles, teaches breathwork meditation, and relishes life as a husband, father of two young daughters, and caretaker of two energetic dogs.
