A BRADFORD gallery will be showing a series of images portraying Chinese life as part of its six-month season of exhibitions on the country.

Mother River, by award-winning photographer Yan Wang Preston, is made up of photographs taken along the entire length of the Yangtze, often known as China’s Mother River.

It will open in Impressions Gallery in City Park on Friday, and has been commissioned in partnership with Gallery of Photography Ireland.

It offers fresh perspectives on China, where traditional landscapes clash with present-day development.

The epic project by Chinese-born Preston, who moved to the UK in 2005, documents the 6,211km route of the river from source to delta, using a strict Y Points System to photograph every 100 kilometres.

Over a period of four years, Preston travelled to the remote high Tibetan Plateau through the Three Gorges to the river’s end at Shanghai. She had to find and photograph 63 locations in diverse and often remote terrain.

The photographer faced hazards from altitude sickness to mudslides, as the river source is 5,400 metres above sea level and half of its length flows through some of the most majestic mountains on Earth.

Preston used a large-format field camera, the kind used by 19th-century explorers, which produces huge negatives, offering images with astonishing detail and resolution.

Earlier this month, Preston won the Syngenta Photography Award for her work Forest.

Closely associated with Chinese traditional paintings and an icon of the national landscape, the Yangtze represents the folklore of traditional China. However, with more than 30 hydroelectric dams on its course, the river is synonymous with China’s rapid industrialisation. Preston hopes Mother River will raise questions about the relationship between nature and culture, tradition and regeneration.

The exhibition is part of Views from China, a six-month programme of exhibitions and events at Impressions looking at Chinese culture and the long-standing links between the UK and China.

Last year the season started with an exhibition by photographer Kurt Tong, which saw a specially-built tea room installed in the gallery. Regular, traditional Chinese tea sessions were held at Impressions throughout the exhibition.