Studio / Gallery
385 St-Paul West, Montréal, QC., H2Y 2A7
marcel@marcelmorin.com
Studio / Gallery
385 St-Paul West, Montréal, QC., H2Y 2A7
marcel@marcelmorin.com
A land journey across Asia, from Suzhou China to Dhaka Bangladesh. Roughly 7,000 kilometers, where movement becomes a way of inhabiting time, and the road a space of attention to cities, the countryside, and the lives of those living at the margins of visibility.
This project is both a photographic expedition and a humanist, philosophical approach. I am not seeking to explain, but to meet. Photographing here is not about capturing, but about being present to what unfolds.
The journey is undertaken alone, with a backpack and a single camera. A Fujifilm X100 VI, fixed 23 mm lens. A deliberate constraint, to slow the gaze and to engage more directly with the people photographed.
What follows is a logbook.
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A first route map sets the intention of the destinations.
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A second accompanies the actual movement, day by day.
This map is not a guide: it is a trace, a thread connecting places, gestures, and the passing of time.
The project is built by walking.
I invite you to follow this crossing.
The intended route
This map outlines a route planned before departure. It does not claim to define a fixed itinerary, but to trace a direction, an intention, a field of possibilities through which the journey can unfold.
The route is a hypothesis, open to detours, delays and the unexpected.
On mobile: use two fingers to adjust the map.
On my way, I encountered...
This map follows the route as it was built day by day.
It records actual movements, prolonged stops, unforeseen detours and breaks in rhythm imposed by the terrain, encounters and circumstances.
The path is no longer a hypothesis: it is the trace left by time.
On mobile: use two fingers to adjust the map.
2026-02-08
Ha Long, Vietnam
A zero or an “O”.
Sometimes everything hinges on a tiny detail.
My Vietnam visa is rejected twice.
On my new Canadian passport, a number ends with a “0”…
or perhaps an “O”.
At the visa office, confusion takes over.
Nothing works.
Four days waiting at the border.
Time stretches.
I need to stay calm.
I analyze the situation.
What I control.
What I don’t.
I have no control over visa offices,
delays,
or the Chinese New Year slowing everything down.
What I can control
is how I think, decide, and adapt.
I make a simple list.
Submit a new application.
Or change plans.
Go through Laos and return to Vietnam later.
I decide to turn back.
I buy a train ticket for the next morning.
Heading to Kunming, near the Lao border.
That evening, one last walk in Pingxiang.
An old neighborhood.
No expectations.
I meet a Brazilian man, his partner, and their daughter.
They’ve been living in Vietnam for years.
I explain my situation.
He looks at me and says,
“I know someone.”
One hour later,
my visa is approved.
I can hardly believe it.
The next morning,
the border crossing goes smoothly.
And suddenly, I’m there.
Northern Vietnam.
The journey south begins.
I walk with my backpack.
A motorbike rider stops
and offers to take me to Lang Son,
about fifteen kilometers away,
for 100,000 dong.
I accept.
When we arrive,
I pull out Vietnamese bills
from a previous trip.
He laughs.
They’ve been out of circulation for years.
A small crowd gathers.
Calls are made.
No exchange is possible.
I offer to pay in Chinese yuan.
He agrees.
A taxi driver helps
and takes me to a bank.
I withdraw cash without issue.
But in the confusion,
I forget my bank card in the ATM.
I realize it later.
Return to the bank.
Explain the situation.
They ask me to wait.
To get a coffee.
I come back.
My card has been recovered.
Relief.
These setbacks are part of the journey.
They are neither failures
nor mistakes.
They teach me to distinguish
what I control —
my thoughts, reactions, decisions —
from what I don’t.
Often, these are the moments
we remember the longest.
After all this,
I can finally head to Ha Long,
in search of photographs,
and above all,
human connection.
Click on the photo to view it full screen.
2026-02-04
Pingxiang, China
I am in Pingxiang, on the border with Vietnam.
Waiting for a visa.
Not moving forward.
While waiting, I walk without a clear intention.
I come across a market.
Or rather, people sitting along the street.
They place their goods in front of them.
Nothing more.
No staging.
No explanation.
I stop.
I look.
I don’t take a photo right away.
I ask myself why this place affects me so deeply.
It isn’t spectacular.
It isn’t “important.”
And yet, something slows down inside me.
As if my body recognizes
a way of living it hasn’t forgotten.
I think of Shenzhen.
Of Hong Kong.
Cities where everything rises, optimizes, accelerates.
Here, nothing tries to impress.
People are simply here.
Still.
I don’t know what the future holds.
I don’t even know what I truly want.
But looking at this market,
I sense that some things matter
without needing to grow,
or to disappear.
This journey keeps bringing me back
to the same quiet question:
what do I choose to nourish within myself
while the world keeps changing?
Click on the photo to view it full screen.
2026-02-01
Hong Kong
I often think about James Clavell’s novel Tai-Pan.
About that captain stepping onto a still-raw island,
unable to imagine what Hong Kong would one day become.
At the time, only a few thousand inhabitants.
Simple buildings.
A harbor.
Trade.
And above all, uncertainty.
The future did not announce itself.
It was being shaped unknowingly.
Today, Hong Kong is a vertical forest.
A density and complexity
no one then could have drawn.
Walking here,
I wonder what we, too,
are building without fully understanding it.
We speak of ecological cities,
of verticality,
of linear projects like The Line in Saudi Arabia.
Cities designed in advance,
calculated, optimized, rational.
But history reminds us of something simple:
cities never become exactly
what their plans promised.
They are shaped by use,
by detours,
by what was never anticipated.
The question may not be
what our cities will look like in fifty years,
but whether they will still leave room
for the unexpected,
the fragile,
the human.
The future always arrives.
What remains to be seen
is how we will walk into it.
Click on the photo to view it full screen.
2026-01-29
Shenzhen, China
Shenzhen is often presented as a feat. A city built from the ground up in just a few decades. Fast. Efficient. Impressive.
But walking here forces you to look beyond the numbers. At human height, the city tells a different story.
I move through neighborhoods where towers rise faster than memory. Then I turn a corner. An improvised market appears.
Vendors seated low. Gestures repeated for years. Without speeches about progress. Without nostalgia either.
Between automated cafés, drone deliveries, and parks where people still dance in the morning, I feel a gap opening.
Not only around me. Within me.
This city moves forward abruptly. It does not ask if we are ready. It moves.
And I walk inside this motion. Trying to understand what still deserves my attention.
This journey is not only geographical. It is also inward.
In a world that accelerates, the question may not be how to keep up, but how to decide what is essential and what can be left behind.
Click on the photo to view it full screen.
2026-01-26
Today, the departure becomes real.
From Suzhou to Shenzhen, in the south of China.
A journey by high-speed train.
Roughly 1,500 kilometers in nine hours, stops included.
Likely the longest uninterrupted segment of the journey.
This part of China is familiar to me.
I have traveled it many times, since my early days here in 2001.
I plan to spend a few days in Shenzhen.
Time to observe, to walk, to photograph.
A new, ultra-modern city,
Shenzhen reveals an architecture unlike anywhere else.
Temporary image generated by AI.
A starting point
2026-01-16
From this balcony in Suzhou, the gaze learned patience.
More than twenty years observing a city in motion,
its morning silences,
its towers rising faster than memory,
its stubborn trees caught between glass and concrete.
This is not an ordinary point of departure.
It is a lived-in place,
shaped by time,
by a life already lived.
The departure does not break — it extends.
The journey begins where one already knows how to see.
