New Town

The work focus on simulated street scenes built to imitate the street styles of different countries and regions. These streets are usually for tourists to take photos, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, they provide people with an opportunity to enjoy different scenery without going abroad. The images taken by tourists are quickly spread online, forming a landscape isolated from the real world. I try to return to these streetscapes to reflect that the existence of a large number of such landscapes is a cover-up and replacement of the real world in the way of objective record, showing a fantasy world full of idealization and isolation from social reality.

It has been three years since the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2019, which has increased the obstacles and health risks of traveling abroad in the past, forcing people to stay in their own cities or even at home.“Photobase”which be called in China offers a low-cost alternative to fake foreign landscapes. This series of topics has been shot since 2019, focusing on the landscape phenomenon generated by the dialogue between artificially reconstructed architectural scenes and everyday real life scenes. Different from our usual life scenes, most of the scenes taken in the works come from the reconstructed landscapes constructed by different photography bases and retro theme stores. When people visit it, they can not only get convenient shooting environment conditions, enjoy unusual old time scenery or western retro town landscape, but also form a unique and pleasant visual experience, as if they are in a new city, and strange landscape forces people to accept and enjoy this kind of immersed interest.Take a curious look at your surroundings with an exotic view, take photos, wander through small towns filled with international characteristics, and recreate buildings built in the style of bygone years. The landscape speaks to us in a way that people want to see, and they have to get into the atmosphere that the landscape creates.

In other words, people in the landscape to photograph the, enjoying the build environment, ignored the real world outside, diligently looking for unusual scenery brings all the sensory stimulation of the visual nerve of prompted to press the shutter maintaining a state of high, resulting in landscape architecture of the reconstruction image. Over time, the various images produced from these places form a closed and recurring system of illusions in the real world, gradually forming a new and fictional landscape city.

All the buildings people see in the constructed landscape can be regarded as artificially constructed symbols to some extent. Whether it is the construction of fictional life scenes or the pursuit of old memories, everything in front of us is the construction of what people want to see in their hearts. These symbols play a significant implications, at the same time was deliberately magnified, exaggerated, a street, a car, behind a building, to represent a kind of style and culture, to achieve the "highly realistic" landscape, Visual symbols are condensed into the most direct and conspicuous landscapes. The existence of a large number of landscapes cover up and replace the reality of the real world. The images generated by the dialogue between the reconstructed architectural scenes and the scenes of daily real life are combined into a covered landscape, showing a world full of idealized illusions isolated from the social reality.