黄

‘Witness’ explores the social environment through walking practice. Walking with a fresh perspective, giving up all my preconceived idea and basis, my work intends to reveal some invisible aspects behind the surface, to find some connection that was supposed not relevant, I hope to bring the audience a new angel to re-examine the world and invite an open debate on the social environment and the relationship between human and nature in China.

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The walking practice is the begging of my creation which plays an essential role in my project, I did three walking practice in my creating period.

The first walking is in the wilderness of Shanghai suburb, named Changxing island, it’s a small and quiet island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, luckily I found an abandoned park, a good place for my walking exploration, it takes about 3 hours walking around the park.

My second walking happened in the old town of Shanghai, call Chenghuang Temple. It’s an area with dense old-style houses surrounded by modern buildings, a place with leisure old Shanghai culture in the noisy city. But I surprisingly found a big part of this area will be demolished. Most of the residents have accepted the deal with the government and moved out, then they sealed the window and door. But some residents are still living here. I don’t know what they are planning to build, what I’m concerning is if they demolish this old community, some precious part at the cultural level will disappear with these old houses forever. I took two pieces of old brick from a broken wall to keep a physical memorial, I think this area will be my long-term project.

The third walking is actually a photo collection of my everyday life, I have a Lomo film camera in my bag, and shoot randomly, use double exposure to get the unexpected folding effect to record my daily life.