At the same time she was working on I Want to Breathe, Li Xinmo also took a series of photographs for a work entitled A Landscape Without Skin. This work presented scenes from the local landscape, which had been excessively mined. The once green mountains and clear water had been transformed into a desert where no grass could grow within a hundred-mile radius. It had become a massive hole that could not be filled or leveled. The ground had been salinized and split open, and gold refinement had severely polluted the local water supply. A deathlike stillness emerges from these photographs.
