Photographs of women moving through the city — between trains, scooters, bicycles, streets, crossings, and everyday routines.
I still keep asking myself why I continue photographing this. If you think you know the answer, let me know.
Lady with a Parasol, Shenzhen
I photographed these images in Shenzhen between 2017 and 2020. In this city, carrying an umbrella is almost part of everyday survival. The summer lasts for most of the year — intense sunlight, sudden rainstorms, typhoons, humidity, construction dust. People leave home prepared for all of it.
I became interested in the way women moved through the city with umbrellas. The gesture itself changes the body — posture, balance, movement, silhouette. Against Shenzhen’s endless construction sites, overpasses, CBD streets, and unfinished urban spaces, umbrellas also brought a strange softness into the city.
At the time, Shenzhen still felt like a city permanently under construction. Roads were constantly being rebuilt, barriers appeared everywhere, and everyone seemed to be rushing somewhere important.
The women carrying umbrellas often felt like the only elegant thing passing through all that noise.
Women I Passed By, Shenzhen
These photographs were taken in Shenzhen between 2016 and 2018. At the time, I spent a lot of time walking through the city with a camera, constantly running into small but strangely dramatic moments.
A girl sitting barefoot between construction sites and luxury towers. Shenzhen often felt like a city where people arrived suddenly and disappeared just as quickly. Maybe that’s why many of these moments felt cinematic to me, even though they were completely real.
A gallery owner friend once told me the photographs reminded him of Jia Zhangke’s films. At the time, I took that as a real compliment.
Looking back now, I think I was simply trying to understand the emotional atmosphere hidden inside the city through the women I passed by.
Between A and B, Shanghai
These photographs were taken in Shanghai between 2022 and 2024. By this point, I had become less interested in photographing complete scenes or clear narratives. My attention gradually shifted toward fragments of the body — legs, feet, hands, posture, balance.
I kept photographing women during everyday transit: sitting in the subway, cycling through traffic, waiting, standing, pausing briefly before continuing somewhere else. I became interested in the parts of the body that quietly carry weight and keep movement possible.
From point A to point B, cities are held together by countless small movements like these.
Over time, I also began reducing faces and identity inside the frame. I wanted the photographs to feel less descriptive and more physical — closer to rhythm, repetition, pressure, and the experience of moving through the city every day.
For me, these fragments started to say more than full stories ever could.
Everyday Transit, Linyi
These photographs were taken on the streets of Linyi between 2020 and 2025. Unlike Shanghai or Shenzhen, most of the people moving through this city are not domestic migrants or white-collar professionals. Many come from nearby towns and rural areas, arriving for work, small business, trade, or temporary opportunities.
Linyi is a northern Chinese city with a population of more than eleven million. The city often feels crowded, improvised, and slightly chaotic. In some ways, that atmosphere reminds me more of Shenzhen a lot.
I photographed women running clothing stalls in wholesale markets, groups of workers eating together at night markets after work, girls riding electric scooters across the city, and others commuting short distances in small tuk-tuks moving through traffic.
Compared to larger Chinese cities, movement here feels slower, more exposed, and more physical. The street itself becomes part of everyday life rather than something separated from it.
Similar Cities, Different Names
These photographs were taken between 2020 and 2023 in Wuhan, Suzhou, Putian, Sanya, and Hangzhou. Even though they were made in different cities across southern China, I often feel as if they could all belong to the same place.
The streets, shopping districts, scooters, fashion trends, and rhythms of movement begin repeating themselves from city to city. Sometimes only the dialect or weather changes. Everything else feels strangely familiar.
What interested me was not documenting each city individually, but observing this growing sense of visual sameness across contemporary urban China.
The photographs sit somewhere between recognition and disorientation — familiar, but never completely identifiable.