The House by Day, the House by Night

The House by Day, the House by Night was photographed during my commute between suburban and central Guangzhou. The work began with a photograph I happened to make of a vacant piece of land marked by tyre tracks, animal footprints, and my own shoe prints. The animal, the machine, and the human body had not been present at the same moment, yet the traces they left behind briefly brought different moments of time together within a single image.

That photograph changed the way I looked at the land I passed each day. In the suburbs, development remains in constant motion: a plot that is empty one day may be fenced off a few days later and prepared for construction; exposed soil, plants, and temporary paths are quickly covered by housing compounds, walls, and roads. Houses continually appear, replacing what existed before. In this sense, the city’s boundary is not only spatial, but also temporal.

In this series, I collage together scenes photographed at different moments: day and night, vacant land and houses, plants and machines, traces that have disappeared and structures that have just emerged. Time layers itself within the same image, making change itself the subject of the work. The house is no longer treated as a stable architectural object, but as the provisional outcome of a continuous process in which land is occupied, transformed, and renamed.

The House by Day, the House by Night examines transitional states within urban expansion and the spaces that remain unfinished, unstable, and subject to disappearance. Through collage, the work compresses together changes repeatedly witnessed yet difficult to hold onto, revealing how the urban fringe is continually built, overwritten, and renewed through time.