‘The girl was so much like the sculptures they became a whole’: Yue Yu’s best phone picture

On the first floor of Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, Yue Yu was waiting for a showing of the Mozart-inspired musical adventure film The Magic Flute to begin. The vast, crowded building is home to an opera house, a concert hall, two theatres – and these open-mouthed, ceramic sculptures.

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“They’re by an artist called Zhu Legeng, and titled with the Chinese character for singing or eulogising. They’re very popular with visitors,” says Yu, 38, who lives in Tianjin, China’s seventh largest city. As he waited for his film, he noticed a family taking pictures of their little girl posing with the sculptures.

Yu asked permission to take his own shot on his iPhone 7 Plus. “Going out with my camera can make me feel obliged to capture something, and take the fun away,” he says. “With my phone, I can record random passersby and strange buildings, and create photographs that are instant, accidental and unique, like this.

“To me, these sculptures sometimes look like they’re singing, sometimes shouting, sometimes simply opening their mouths,” he adds. “I wouldn’t have taken this photograph of an adult in this position because they would have become the protagonist. But this girl? She was so much like the sculptures that they became a whole. I was just a spectator.”