SHE is a multi-millionaire, rich and powerful. Yet, outside her business empire, she has earned fame as the “Crazy Lady of China’s photography community.”

Crazy because as a mature photographer, 55-year-old Wang Xinmei has journeyed the North Pole 14 times to photograph wild animals, and to the South Pole six times to photograph king and emperor penguins.

Crazy also because she is building China’s first photography library, Yingshang Shufang, in her hometown Jiaxing. At the beginning, most photographers didn’t take her seriously, saying it’s just the wayward behavior of a rich woman, with money to burn and time to kill.

But Wang herself knows she is on a rocky and yet hopeful road toward self-redemption.

In March 2017 after almost 10 years of hard work, Wang became the first female photographer to hold a solo exhibition at the National Art Museum of China. Entitled “The Transcendence of Heart,” Wang’s shots of nature left those who had once scoffed at her deeply touched.

One critic noted that Wang “created the most heart-warming images from the world’s coldest place. The penguin photos from other photographers, with perfect composition, light and shade, are cold and remote. Wang’s shots exhibit something humane, compassionate, and life affirming.”

In one picture showing a penguin family of three, the chick in the middle holds its head high like an impish child, while the parents are lowering their heads as though they were trying to discipline the little baby.

“Wang might not have any particular philosophy about life, but her penguin images show us the photographer as an individual being, as though her humble life is mysteriously connected with the birds,” says Jin Yongquan, chief editor of the Chinese Photography, a monthly magazine.

After some serious difficulties in her life, Wang found her true self through photography.

In 1999, at the age of 37, Wang was the vice president of a listed company in the eastern city Jiaxing, about 100 kilometers southwest of Shanghai, that she and her husband had started from scratch. That year she was diagnosed as having an immune condition. The disease attacked her joints and organs so badly that she could hardly walk and breathe. She resigned in 2000.

“When you realize the resignation means you no longer have a say in the company, all of a sudden you’ve lost your reason for living,” Wang recalls.

The treatment for the disease greatly altered her appearance. She went from a delicate and slender lady who only wears silk underwear to a “fatty” who could only dress in baggy outfits. “I gained 20 kilograms. I changed so much that my next door neighbor of nine years didn’t recognize me when we met one day at a shopping mall.”

At the moment when her neighbor failed to recognize her, Wang made a decision. “Rather than stay immersed in self-pity, I decided to go somewhere far away and alien enough that I could recharge myself.”

In 2008, she made her first trip to the South Pole. The first creatures she spotted were king penguins. This little flightless bird, standing only 100 centimeters tall at most and weighing 18kg, would completely change the life of Wang — 162 centimeters tall and weighing 65kg.

One day, out on the ice with the temperature around 30 degrees below, Wang witnessed an engaging scenario. A month-old penguin was dying. Three big penguins gathered around the chick, holding it tightly to help the little bird hang on and survive. A few minutes later, the little thing gave its last gasp. The three big penguins gave a grievous cry, like an emergency call. In a moment a large group of penguins appeared and gave a sorrow-stricken whine in unison.

The spectacle of penguins expressing their pure love left Wang, who has experienced more than her share of the cold and inconstancy of human relationships, with tears.

“In this bird’s world, I got to see myself in reality, both in the ruthless business circle and in photographic society. I feel like a penguin, waddling but strong.”

Since then, her signature became King Penguin on WeChat.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that without the encountering of the penguin, I would be nobody but a rich woman,” she says.

In spite of all her wealth, Wang is modest and plain. She wears no makeup, no diamond jewelry, and carries no brand bag or watch.

“I’m just a farmer, with little culture,” she says.

Born in 1962 to a farmer family in Heshan township in Jiaxing, Wang is the youngest of five children. Her illiterate parents worked hard to ensure that her education went through high school, thus she became the one with highest education in the family.

When she was 20, Wang married Shen Yuxing, a farm boy in neighboring township, handsome, but poor, three years her senior, who had no high school diploma. But he had a vision.

“After the country opened up in 1979, he set up a private leather shoe factory,” says Wang, who was the bookkeeper for the factory.”

“In my husband’s eyes, I was the one with knowledge and culture,” Wang says proudly. “I don’t have to do farm work or household chores. I was free just to lie in bed, reading all kinds of novels. The more I read, the more I learned how narrow my view of the world was. I remember telling myself that someday I must get out of the countryside and see the world.”

After becoming a professional photographer, Wang started to journey round the world, “not for personal pleasure, but to collect photography books, and explore the culture of Western photography.”

“I don’t have solid training in photography,” Wang says bluntly. “So many things in this field I don’t understand, especially photographic theory. I need to learn a lot.”

Her hunger for learning fueled Wang’s ambition not just to collect photography books, but to also build a library for those books.

In 2014, Wang began to collect books from Japan and some Western countries in large quantities. “Buying the books,” Wang says, “to me is an intimate contact with the great photographers in history. Once you open a book, you begin a dialogue with them.”

To Wang, spending money on books is like other women who lavish it on jewelry.

“When I go searching for a set of good books, I am overjoyed. If I fail to get the books I want, they will be on my mind until I get them.” Over the past three years, Wang has spent about 10 million yuan (US$6.9 million) purchasing some 6,000 books.

The rarest and most expensive one is “China and its People” by British photographer John Thomson, who is regarded as the first foreign photographer to document China. Wang spent 400,000 yuan to obtain this set of four volumes in the 1873 edition.

In April 2015, Wang’s three-story library, Yingshan Shufang, was completed with an investment of 30 million yuan.

“Wang has a generous heart. Collecting books and building her private library is actually building an infrastructure for China’s photographic culture. It will fill the gaps that we have all kinds of buildings, but have no contents and great masters,” says Jin Yongquan.

Jin notes that China’s photography culture has long been controlled by ideology and commercialism.

“These two forces have created a group of suspicious photography experts who have hindered the construction of a culture of photographic art.”

Now as one of the most noted book collectors in China, Wang says: “My ultimate intention is to let Yingshang Shufang develop into an organ that has academic value, and let it become a database for scholars in the future to study Chinese photography. If, in the future, when speaking of Jiaxing city, people could say ‘Aha, there is a private library called Yingshang Shufang in the city,’ I would feel greatly honored, and very, very happy.”