My practice explores the relationship between people and the urban landscape, through photography, performative actions, and walking as a form of visual mapping.
I am originally from SiChuan, China and studied Landscape Design in the Zhejiang University of Technology before Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art.
How are public spaces divided? What is the meaning and behaviour of different kinds of barriers in these spaces? I am interested in ways that physical discontinuities suggest themselves as barriers and shape diverse environments.
I use walking as a method. My body enters a dialogue with its environment, capturing fragments of being in the street, and able to feel the moments when the body is contained or isolated by buildings.
The walks start from home and gradually extend from the familiar towards the unfamiliar. As a walker-observer, my identity changes with my surroundings. Pedestrians, street signs and postcodes are my conditioning factors. I record the defamiliarisation, towards strangeness.
Between the lines #1
This series of photographic observations were taken on walks through Battersea Park and Hyde Park in London. They explore boundaries, distance and scale in public spaces.
Between the Lines #2
This eighteen-page publication meditatively documents a journey through Hyde Park from my house, using the media of photography and writing.
I observed and recorded transitions in architecture, signage, streetscape and passers-by along the way and within fifty minutes. Through the interplay of narrative, poetic writing and scattered, fragmented images I intend to invoke the performative experience of an urban journey.
