Village of Oblivion

By composing, overlaying, and blending those photographic images, I attempted to create landscapes floating in a surreal dimension, representing Guangzhou's Urban Villages phenomena.

Over the past five years, I have been living in Guangzhou. As a result of reform and opening up, Guangzhou has become one of China's most modern cities and one of the most representative cities for the phenomena of “Urban Villages”.

According to the official definition, an urban village is a residential region that lags behind the pace of urban development and has a low level of living amid fast urban expansion. And these villages seem to be gradually marginalized and oblivious to urbanization.

Old buildings in urban villages are significant symbols of the urban village phenomena. To spotlight and visualize those villages of oblivion, I spent two months living in an urban village in Guangzhou and started capturing aging buildings and urbanization signs here, such as abandoned water towers, ancient industries, and incomplete buildings, as well as concrete surfaces, demolished glass, steel patterns, and smoke exhaled from chemical companies. By composing, overlaying, and blending those photographic images, I attempted to create landscapes floating in a surreal dimension, representing Guangzhou's Urban Villages phenomena in an artistic vision. In such a particular way, the accidental "interaction" between the aging architecture, construction materials, and the natural ecology forms a delicate symbiosis, revealing the true vitality of the city‘s development.