"0"

After many years, I finally returned to my hometown. It was hotter than I remembered. The order that once held the city together was beginning to collapse, and some kind of curse was slowly awakening eventually, the sun would consume both the city and me

0 is an ongoing photographic project combining photography, image collage, and fictional writing. Set in Foshan, China, the project reimagines a hometown slowly dissolving under an unbearable heat. It is inspired by my childhood fear of extreme weather, as well as the phenomenon of “Lost Media” — things that once existed but can no longer be seen, verified, or fully remembered.

The project unfolds through conversations between “I” and my lover, XI ZI, weaving together personal memories, local folklore, family archives, and fictional narratives to construct a private mythology of the city. A land abandoned by the gods, an apocalyptic prophecy hidden within a family album, a childhood friend I remember clearly but who cannot be found anywhere — everything that once seemed certain gradually slips into oblivion under the rising heat. When memory becomes unreliable, history develops gaps, and the familiar landscape of home becomes strange, photography no longer functions as a record of reality, but as a way of reconstructing it.

0 is not an objective archive of Foshan, but a private diary that perhaps should never have existed. Through photography, I attempt to reconstruct a city that has disappeared, is disappearing, or perhaps never truly existed — a place containing both the past I experienced and the future I imagined should have happened. As reality and fiction continually overlap, the image becomes an act of resistance against forgetting, as well as a way for me to reconsider home, time, and my own existence.