I flew into Beijing with the TBWA team to meet Lu Chuan, the first of my six subjects for Martell’s Join the New Elegance campaign.

Outside the window, tall birch trees gradually shrank, becoming shrubs; soon only twigs stuck out of the snow. When, finally, darkness enshrouds landscape of ice and snow, we knew we had arrived in the extreme North.

In 2012, French spirits company Pernod Ricard commissioned me to highlight its efforts empowering locals in Dimen village, in China’s impoverished Guizhou province, to retain their culture through skilled marketing of traditional craftsmanship.

In 2010 and 2011, OXFAM approached me to work with them on a campaign to raise awareness of the economic stagnation and crumbling welfare that was plaguing post-Soviet countries, 20 years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

In April of this year the New York Times assigned me to explore in a series of 20 photographs the new Chinese leadership’s dramatic, history-making plan to turn 250 million farmers into city dwellers in the coming 12 years.