留白 - Leave Blank

In this photo series I want explore the layers of absence and presence in the city, highlighting the individuality of each sealed space against the anonymity of Shanghai's urban flow.

In this series I explore the layers of absence and presence in Shanghai, highlighting the individuality of each sealed space against the anonymity of the urban flow.

Having lived in Shanghai for 13 years, I've witnessed the city's relentless transformation as a part of daily life. Yet, returning after the pandemic presented a starkly different Shanghai. Instead of the old cityscape swiftly being replaced by new constructions, I found places seemingly locked in a state of purgatory—hovering between presence and absence. In a Kafkaesque fashion, everything at eye level was draped in a uniform, drab gray color; openings into the houses and alleyways meticulously sealed, forbidding even the slightest glimpse inside. Graffiti or any unsolicited markings were promptly erased by painting crews, maintaining a monochrome facade.

As I resumed my routine of cycling around the city, I encountered these gray expanses stretching for blocks, their vastness impossible to capture in a single frame. It was through panoramic captures (digital slit-scanning), taken from my bicycle that I began to document this new, obscured Shanghai—a cityscape caught in an eerie limbo, its stories entombed behind layers of gray.

The series underlines the irony of Shanghai's ubiquitous gray buildings, which have become invisible markers of the city's rapid transformation. This normalization of urban erasure has sparked a desire for me to document these public spaces. "留白" (referring to the negative space in Chinese art) employs panoramic and medium format presentations formats to explore the dual themes of movement versus stillness, and the collective versus the individual, reflecting on the nature of urban change and identity.

In contemporary Shanghai, where appearances reign supreme, the line between nostalgic romanticism and reality blurs. In a world saturated with augmented realities and simulacra, rare glimpses into the fabric of actuality emerge through the details. With a loose curatorial approach, I worked together with different artists to reimagine a different Shanghai as much as practically and legally possible. By re-photographing, manipulating time and the two-dimensionality of public spaces in photographic imagery, I want to probe the effects of erasure and substitution, question the documentary credibility of photography, and explore the notion of image authorship in front and behind the camera.