Xiaobei Passport

I recreated the goldrush dreams of the African migrants in Guangzhou.

Since the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic in January 2020, international transit has been hampered, foreign trade has suffered many difficulties, and many Africans living in Guangzhou have chosen to leave. While Chinese foreign trade shops along the Bao Han Straight Street in Xiaobei decided to shut down, customized phone cases, frames, shopping bags, and keychains that had been made using African customers photos' were left unattended in the windows of abandoned shops in Xiaobei, Guangzhou, covered in dust. Perhaps because they didn't know when African customers would return to Guangzhou, the owners of the foreign trade shops didn't know what to do with the goods——to wait for their return or to put the shops up for sale.

After experiencing many twists and turns, I bought some African merchandise with customized images that represented Africans' desire for a better life in Guangzhou: pink plastic diamonds, luxury items with big logos, skyscrapers and overpasses, sunny young people in football uniforms, successful men and sexy women in decent dresses. But the truth was that these visions of beauty were sealed away in a foreign country and became a collection of wandering images.

Using the techniques of commercial product photography for reference, I recreated the goldrush dreams of the African migrants in Guangzhou by using plastic diamonds and colored pearls as props, fabric printed with counterfeit luxury goods purchased at the Bao Han Street as the background, and searched for symbolic street scenes to photograph in the way of reconstitution of their dreams.