Qianqian Li

These pictures are captured from the online real-estate agency, where the last archives of homes across the country before sale are preserved neutrally by panoramic photography. I started this project because I unexpectedly revisited my childhood home which I was permanently separated from on the house trading platform. I wandered around every corner of strangers’ homes with the mechanical body, experiencing the joy of voyeurism, as well as feeling alienation — when a home became a commodity, for the former owner, all the privacy and emotional attributes were stripped away. 

I printed and framed these screenshots, and the family space became the protagonist of the photo. Qian Zhongshu wrote in the prose window,Spring should be seen in the window! If the door implies desire, then the window means possession. At home, you own all the scenery you can see from the window. The photo frame has a similar function, according to Gillian Rose, the use of family photographs enabled people to create a sense of ‘homeliness’, a material environment that felt ‘homely’. People press the shutter on the thing they love, and they help the owner to take the thing they love as their own.

If I want to live there forever, why not? Those vanished spaces tucked in the frame, brewed, and then married the dream in the fluffy quilt.

This is part one of the film. In the video, the lost space described by the interviewee was reconstructed by me with the footage of the stranger's house used for trading. Memories are strengthened by being spatialized, and the home is no longer experienced from an empirical point of view but becomes a constructed boundary that tightly surrounds the self.

Who doesn't like shells? Small, exquisite, sticky shells that grow up with the bodies living in them, both male and female shells are equally charming! The motto of mollusks is that living is to build a home. I love the shape of their lives, just as I love the peace I built from the inside.