Homeland project

This project was done when I finally came back to my home city in China after four years of staying in France. 

The photos I took are mainly local architecture and street views. There is no evident storytelling among them, the viewers can see each of them as an independent work. If they are hung in a white space gallery, they should be printed in the same size of 1x0.8 metres and juxtaposed one after another in a horizontal line. But there is a sequence to watch as they are presented on the web page, vertically. 

My motivation for taking these photos is simple: I miss these scenes, and I am afraid that one day they disappear thence can never be revisited, either in real place or in images. This fear somehow nurtured my dreams in which both satisfying and depressive stories happened. I know the best way to settle them down is to revisit these scenes in reality and transform them into visual images, so I can come back to them whenever I feel needed. In this sense, these images are genuinely personal, having nothing to do with designing an effect to pose on viewers as artists usually aspire.  

Still, I am too late to come up with such an idea. Some street installations I missed in my dreams have been dismantled or disfigured for a long time, my fear has somehow become a reality. For them, maybe the best way to conjure them is to constantly talk with people who have the same memory. But that’s another story, another project to do.