The Black Pearl of Beijing

In a moment of suspended time during worldwide pandemic, an ancient capital is stripped down to its deepest anxieties...and to a phantom pearl that may or may not exist.

The Black Pearl of Beijing is a photography series shaped as an urban myth. Created between 2020 and 2022, it explores the city's fragile balance between myth and reality during the time of lockdowns and collective unease. When daily life was suspended and the future uncertain, imagination became a refuge, and mythology returned as a language to describe what reason could not.

In 2020, Beijing transformed overnight. The noise vanished, the streets emptied, pollution dissolved, revealing rare blue skies. Conversation shrank to whispers and cries. Gated communities closed. People exchanged rumors and conspiracy theories, avoiding each other's gaze.

Weird stories were exchanged in hushed tones: of the haunted house on Chaoyangmen Street, of a ghost bus number 375, of restless spirits haunting the construction of the first subway line, of the razed and looted Old Summer Palace. These urban myths shaped a collective imagination where memory and fiction intertwined. The black pearl was born as an homage to those stories — suspended between dream and history, something endlessly sought, never found.

The series is centered around the mysterious object that may have never existed, drifting through the work as a phantom idea, connecting the ancient and the modern, the visible and the hidden. The Black Pearl of Beijing is a poetic map of an invisible city, where myth and memory merge, and where the search itself becomes the only proof that the black pearl had ever existed.