Steven Raidis at Raidis Estate in Coonawarra, South Australia invited me to hold an exhibition in his Cellar Door as a part of the Penola Coonawarra Arts Festival on May 6-9. I made the decision to focus on the isolated Xinjiang province of north western China.

Raidis Estate is well known regionally for exceptional wine served with traditional greek food, and MedEast will combine photography with Fassoulada soup and Mezze platters from the Mediterranean.

Coonawarra’s Jamie McDonald spent ten days in this little known region of China in 2009 visiting Kashgar, the Karakoram Highway and the Taklamakan Desert. For centuries this region was traversed by traders and their caravans on the Silk Road taking valuable commodities from China back to the west.

Ferocious deserts, awe inspiring mountains and a torturous climate ensures China’s largest province in area remains one of its least populated. Taking up one-sixth of China’s land and bordering Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, Xinjiang (Shin-Jee-Ang) shares little with our preconceived ideas of China. There are no rice paddies, no conical hats, no bright lights of Hong Kong, and few people speaking Mandarin Chinese.

Xinjiang is home to the Uyghur (wee-ger); a people descended from the Turks in Central Asia. Predominately a Muslim people, the Uyghur speak their own language, similar to modern Turkish. The province is a difficult homeland, and the Uyghur’s survival of drought, flood, freezing winters and blistering summers is combined with borders that have separated their people over several different countries.

The Taklamakan Desert, almost twice the size of Australia’s Simpson takes up much of the land in Xinjiang. Ringed by mountains the extreme temperatures of the Taklamakan range from a furnace in Summer and in Winter when the mercury drops below -20° Celsius, and can result in the entire desert being sheeted in ice.

Whilst Xinjiang misses out on being home to the highest mountain, Everest, it boasts the second highest in K2, and it can easily be accessed from the Karakoram Highway. This wild road leads the traveller on a 1300km journey from Kashgar to Islamabad in Pakistan, driving through the Pamir and Karokoram ranges and peaking at the Khunjerab Pass at a height of 4,693m.

Sadly like much of the news we receive from remote parts of the world is negative. Weeks after I left the province news broke of riots in the Xinjiang capital, Urumqi. The riots and subsequent crackdown cost 197 people their lives and Human Rights Watch has reported numerous cases of Uyghur men disappearing in police sweeps.

This exhibition is not a report or a statement on the politics, nor religion of China and its people. It is a snapshot of a beautiful landscape and the people that survive it.