Images of homes, temporary dwellings, urban villages, and the spaces people continue to inhabit and shape over time.
The meaning of “home” keeps changing as we grow older.
Gangxia Village, Shenzhen
I started street photography after moving from Shanghai to Shenzhen in 2015. I kept going back to Gangxia Village, a crowded urban village sitting right next to the glass towers of Futian CBD. The contrast was impossible to ignore.
Originally a Hakka settlement, Gangxia later became home to tens of thousands of migrants arriving in Shenzhen for work. The village was packed with small apartments, narrow alleys, restaurants, internet cafés, delivery workers, office workers, and people constantly coming and going. Everything felt compressed together. You could walk from luxury malls into a completely different world within a few minutes.
I was also one of the many outsiders living in Shenzhen at the time.
These photographs were taken in 2021, when I returned to Shenzhen and went back to Gangxia again. I was interested in the density, the temporary feeling of the place, and the rhythm of people arriving, staying briefly, and disappearing back into the city again.
Old Home by the Moat, Linyi
These photographs were taken between 2020 and 2021 during the demolition of the old moat area in Linyi, near where my family has lived for generations. Locally, people call this area Chengheyan’er, beside the remains of the old city wall. This is part of an ongoing project I have been photographing since 2015.
Over the past few decades, the neighborhood has gone through repeated demolitions and redevelopment plans. Parts of it disappeared, while other parts remained in a strange in-between state for years. Many families moved away, but some residents, tenants, small businesses, and older generations continued living there.
I kept returning to photograph the area as it slowly changed.
The project is less about nostalgia than about observing what remains inside a city under constant reconstruction. Rubble, temporary spaces, empty rooms, old trees, handwritten signs, and leftover objects still carried traces of everyday life.
The city wall is gone, but the moat is still there. So is the idea of home.
Municipal Compound Studio, Linyi
I left home at fifteen to study abroad, and after turning eighteen in Australia, I spent years moving between rented apartments and temporary places to live. I never expected that, at thirty-four, I would return to my hometown of Linyi and end up living in an old family apartment that had been empty for more than twenty years.
The apartment was older than I was — a residential building originally built for local government employees in the early 1980s. After adding a few pieces of furniture, it slowly became my first real studio.
By then, I had already met my wife, Leslie. Whenever she had time, she would come and stay with me there.
In 2019, I began seriously reorganizing my earlier photographs in this apartment and started experimenting with drawing and painting directly onto photos — ideas I had wanted to explore since high school.
The old apartment became a quiet and very personal space for me. Looking back now, it was one of the happiest periods of my life — having a place of my own while still living close to my parents.