In love with the camera

Born in 1962 to a peasant family in the Heshan township in Jiaxing, Wang is the youngest of five children. Her illiterate parents worked to see her through high school, making her the child with most education in her family.

When she was 20, Wang married Shen Yuxing, a farm boy in a neighboring township, handsome, but poor. But he had a vision. After the country opened up in 1979, he set up a private leather shoe factory. And Wang became the bookkeeper for the factory, because she could write well.

"In my husband's eyes, I was the one with knowledge and culture," Wang says.

"I did not have to do household chores. I was free just to lie in bed, reading all kinds of novels. The more I read the more I learned how narrow my view of the world was. I remember telling myself that someday I must get out of the countryside and see the world."

After becoming a professional photographer, Wang started to journey around the world not for personal pleasure but to collect photography books and explore photography.

"I do not have solid training in photography," Wang says bluntly. "There are so many things in this field I do not understand, especially photographic theory. I need to learn a lot."

Her hunger for learning, however, fueled Wang's ambition not just to collect photography books but to also build a library for those books.

In 2014, Wang began to collect books from Japan and some Western countries in large quantities. "Buying books to me is a way to connect with the great photographers in history. Once you open a book, you begin to have a dialogue with them," she says.

In the course of reading and collecting books, Wang is not looking for masters to worship.

Take Diane Arbus, for instance, who is regarded as a master of documentary photography in the US.