The Dwarves Empire (Chinese: 小人国) by Xiangjie Peng was made in 2011-2012 in China’s Dwarf Empire fantasy park, where people with dwarfism lived and worked as performers in a setting built around fantasy and tourism.
Peng came to the series after reading reports on the park’s opening in August 2011 and the ethical criticism that followed in international media. Rather than treating the site as material for an exposé, he approached it as a sustained documentary inquiry into a community shaped by early 21st-century China’s drive for tourism and development. The park offered employment and a degree of social refuge to performers who had often faced discrimination elsewhere, even as it turned them into attractions for visitors.
Within that framework, Peng examines a social world outside officially favored images of Chinese life. The series does not resolve the park’s ethical contradictions; instead, it records how its residents inhabited them, asking viewers to consider how agency, labor, belonging, and visibility operate inside an environment that is both theatrical and everyday.
Visually, The Dwarves Empire is built from environmental portraits and groupings made in the park’s artificial fairy-tale spaces, including mushroom-like architecture, staged interiors, and performance areas. Peng often photographed performers between shows, when costume and ordinary presence overlapped. The compositions are generally frontal and still, with subjects posing as they chose. Natural and available light anchor the pictures in the site’s actual atmosphere, while the contrast between fantasy decor and direct portraiture creates a mood that shifts between the surreal and the matter-of-fact.
Working through long observation rather than overt intervention, and drawing on an analog, negative-based practice, Peng allowed the performers a measure of control over their appearance. The series has been discussed internationally for its non-judgmental treatment of a difficult subject. Exhibited in venues such as the Dali International Photography Exhibition and OFOTO in Shanghai, it also reflects Peng’s place within contemporary Chinese documentary photography, especially through his sustained attention to marginalized communities.
