Remnants (2017-present)

What do spaces hold after people leave?

This series begins with a third look.

Most of my life has been informed by this feeling of being overlooked. As a queer, Chinese immigrant, I've lived life on the fringes. I was always the last to be chosen. I was always the outlier. I didn't quite fit in, with life itself.

I have moved through the world feeling unseen for much of my life, and I find that experience shapes what I notice and how. To photograph the overlooked is also, in a small way, to identify with it.

Remnants (2017–present) is an ongoing photographic series made in the streets, alleyways, and parking lots of cities I move through and bear witness to — the honest edges of urban life. I photograph slowly, without staging or manipulation, the spaces a city is built on but never asked to look at: stacked chairs against a tiled wall, a payphone on a corner nobody calls from anymore, shopping carts that have gathered themselves beneath a bougainvillea, a trash can refracting a private rainbow.

Adhering to liubai, a Chinese aesthetic principle of deliberate emptiness so that presence is felt through what remains, the work is not a salvage operation. It is an attention practice. The dignity is not added; it was always there.

These spaces were not staged for me. I did not make them. I arrived, I waited, and they were already brilliant.