Experiences of the City

Experiences of the City is an ongoing observation of everyday urban spaces, public infrastructure, and the traces left by ordinary life. The works move between street bollards, illuminated advertising boxes, abandoned factories, online nicknames, and handwritten messages left by workers. Although these subjects appear unrelated, they collectively record how people understand, use, and leave their presence within the city.

I often focus on elements that have clearly defined functions yet remain visually overlooked. Bollards are installed to control vehicles and divide space, while their scratches and impact marks register repeated friction between human movement and urban order. Advertising light boxes continue to alter the appearance of streets and pedestrians even after their commercial images have disappeared. Writing found inside abandoned factories preserves traces of workers who once laboured, rested, and communicated there.

The series also considers the movement between physical and digital identities. In Everyone Has an Online Nickname, a nickname becomes a new name chosen when entering online space. It conceals aspects of a person’s offline identity while revealing how they wish to imagine and present themselves. Urban life therefore extends beyond streets, buildings, and workplaces into spaces structured by screens, accounts, and information.

Through photographing and reorganising these subjects, I approach the city as a surface that is continuously written upon and overwritten. Planning, commerce, and production assign spaces their initial functions, while everyday actions modify them and leave behind scratches, words, gestures, and temporary uses. Urban experience takes shape through these small encounters: how a body moves around an obstacle, how a sentence remains on a wall, how artificial light transforms the night, and how a person chooses another name for themselves.