When I was sent an assignment to northeast China,
I was not told on the phone for security reasons what I was going to shoot.
But once I arrived in Shenyang, I got in touch with the writer,
and then I learned what we were going to do, and that's how it started.
Our helper in South Korea, he just made sure that we would not be seen very much in the open.
So we were just waiting for phone calls,
and then we went to certain places where they were, the refugees.
To meet some of them, we went out, I think in the middle of the night,
it was really pitch dark, I even had no idea where we were.
We seemed to be in some village by the border.
And then I started asking, if we can't see your face, that's fine too,
or even just a shadow, if that's okay,
but please give us something of yourself, if that's possible.
Here and there, they felt maybe a little bit ridiculous when I said,
if you wish, just put a hat on your head, or just cover yourself as you wish.
The only importance to me is there's something of you.
One of the first people was a very young teenager who agreed just to loosen him up a little bit.
He was so scared, he had never really seen westerners.
We invited him to a restaurant.
He looked very, very skinny, so we bought him some milk,
and he was just staring at like, and he didn't dare to drink.
So we asked him, what's going on?
Don't you like this?
And he asked what that was, he had never seen milk in his life.
One of the people who you see in the images in the exhibition,
the activist standing like this, I personally felt,
I was really shocked, I had no idea that really exists.
It's like a very quiet story, a very quiet but very powerful,
and I think it's a very important story to tell.
If you think of that picture, that's a woman actually.
Many people think it's a man.
It's a woman in her late 60s who's dedicated her life going in and out of North Korea
to help refugees to come out.
I don't know, I have so much admiration for these people.
When we met her, all her finances had been confiscated by the police
in order to prevent her from moving around.
And I don't know, I was just shocked and I thought,
this is not something you just do once on assignment and then you let go.
It doesn't feel right just to stop there.
It really doesn't feel right.
There is two pictures of bridges.
One is the Friendship Bridge in Dandong.
China is on the left-hand side, North Korea on the right-hand side.
This bridge is used mostly for trade, to transport goods to North Korea.
I have another bridge in Tumen and the Tumen area
that I took right in the middle.
That bridge is also used, sadly, to repatriate refugees if they are caught in China.
Among the people I met, there was one elderly lady who was disabled,
who was kind of stumbling.
And she had given us a very close description of where she had crossed the border,
so that was that landscape.
And we just wanted to see it with our own eyes
because it took her more than six days to reach just the village.
There's this constant fear, you just feel it.
Somehow these pictures maybe can help to explain the whole paranoia and fear
because you're so wide in the open, you're so vulnerable.
It's a big, big risk, although it doesn't look like it at all.
And I personally think something maybe that's also lacking.
Here and there, of course, you read about North Korea,
but mostly the leadership, not that much about the refugees or the people.
You even feel without understanding the language,
how tense they are and how paranoid.
Because there's also people who here and there have asked me,
so are these art pictures, are these staged pictures,
just then it's staged and then it are pictures.
