New World

The subway ads promised a new world I could never reach — so I made it out of what was already in my hands: the groceries from the supermarket.

I was born in a small town that makes fireworks.

When I moved to Hefei, the city really did look as new as the world inside its advertisements — clean ground, orderly lights, everything arranged as if placed there by careful hands.

On the subway, the ads kept promising a new world, somewhere I was about to arrive. But the space I actually lived in never matched them. I rode my electric scooter to the supermarket; when it snowed and the roads turned slippery, I held my vegetables and took the subway home. The screen in the car announced another new city project. I was the one riding that subway every day, and I never reached the new world it kept showing me.

So I imagined the ordinary space I had arrived in as the new world instead — and I made it out of what was already in my hands.

I started photographing the things I look at every day. Eggshells, broccoli, bones, fish, bottles on the windowsill — a knife resting on the counter, earphones trampled into the dirt, a sign at the subway entrance telling you where not to stand. I took them off the table, off the ground, out of plastic bags, and let them be seen — clearly, quietly, the way an advertisement would.

These photographs look like advertisements because the new world I was promised was made of advertisements. I gave my own daily life the same language, until the space I had arrived in slowly became the new world I had been waiting for.

In the future I once imagined, this ordinary life was the distant dream. Every small thing I have grown tired of is something that past version of me desperately wanted. So I rest my eyes on them again, as if seeing them for the first time.