A parallax world

My upbringing in a quaint Canadian prairie town could not prepare me for the striking parallax that Chinese cities invoke at all angles—this project aims to show perspective on urban hypergrowth and the regular people that inhabit those cities.

My hometown in Canada is a place where space is horizontal and change unfolds slowly enough to be measured in seasons. Century-old grain elevators cast long shadows over decommissioned railway lines; there are more antique shoppes than restaurants; a single hockey rink anchors winter life. Time announces itself through hay bales, the smell of fall leaves, and the first snowfall.

During my first trip to China in 2024, my sense of time and scale fractured. Traveling across Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan, and the many places in between—regions that, within recent memory, resembled the farmland surrounding my hometown—I encountered a landscape in accelerated transformation unlike the sedate mountains, forests, and prairies of Alberta.

What struck me was not only the volume of construction, but the simultaneity of it. Entire districts appeared mid-sentence: cranes suspended above half-finished towers, expressways carving through farmers' fields, transmission lines extending outward to the horizon as if growth were a foregone conclusion. I imagined what it must feel like to have lived through such breakneck expansion, not as spectacle, but as daily reality. Change did not feel episodic like back home; it felt ambient.

Although the architecture appeared repetitive and immense, I began to see the connective systems binding it together. Between the interspersed towers, a rhythm emerged: the power grid, architecture, and logistics corridors dancing in coordination. Beneath it all were the routines of daily life.

This project aims to observe how ordinary lives persist within accelerated growth—how people navigate, inhabit, and adapt to a landscape that is constantly recalibrating its own scale. Through these images, I invite viewers to reconsider the infrastructure that shapes their own environments and to recognize the subtle human negotiations embedded within urban expansion, regardless of its pace.