China’s Sufis: The Shrines Behind the Dunes

Lisa Ross’s photographs are not our usual images of Xinjiang. In 2008, 2009, and 2012, Xinjiang was the site of bloody protests. Instead of representing these political conflicts, however, Ross’s photographs are unassuming and quiet; people are never present and the objects she captures—stone on sand, cloth on stone, the skeleton of a dried animal—have an incandescent glow, as if lit by another sun. In fact, these images reveal a little-known religious tradition in Xinjiang—its desert shrines to Sufi saints. Taken in Xinjiang’s Taklamakan Desert, they are collected in Ross’s addictive new book, Living Shrines of Uyghur China, and are now on view at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.