People Transporting Goods to a Livestreaming Town

This work was photographed in a Chinese town where livestream e-commerce has become highly concentrated. Each day, large quantities of goods are transported from surrounding areas to local distribution centres, before entering livestream studios, warehouses, and courier networks. People pull, push, and carry enormous packages through the streets, moving in groups towards the same destination.

The packages frequently obscure the workers’ bodies and faces, making them appear almost propelled by the goods they carry. Only arms, footsteps, and bent postures remain visible, revealing the physical weight and distance that commodities must pass through before appearing on a screen or becoming an online order.

Livestream commerce is presented on mobile devices as immediate, frictionless, and fast. Its operation, however, depends on dense systems of storage, handling, and logistical labour. The work focuses on one of the less visible stages of this circulation: between platforms, livestream hosts, and consumers, groups of workers physically absorb the volume, weight, and time pressure of the goods.

I stitched these passing figures into an elongated image, turning their movement into a continuously extending procession. As the oversized packages repeat across the frame, they gradually dominate the image, revealing how digital consumption is translated into physical weight, labour, and circulation.