Stone Bollards (Revisited)

In 2022, I photographed a group of street bollards at a crossroads in Longhua, Shenzhen. Years of friction had covered their surfaces with scratches left by electric bicycles, yet the makers of these marks remained absent from the image.

Four years later, I returned to the same intersection. This time, I turned my camera towards the people passing through it. Pedestrians, delivery riders, electric bicycles, and bundles of goods photographed at different moments are layered into a single image. Bodies that originally belonged to separate moments gradually lose their clear boundaries and merge into a dense, continuously moving crowd. The blank area at the centre marks the position once occupied by the bollards, while a bollard isolated on the right reappears as an independent object.

Rather than recording a single decisive moment, this work returns to a previously photographed site in order to restore the people who had once remained outside the frame. The bollards both organise the movement of bodies and vehicles and preserve the traces left by their repeated passage. Taken four years apart, the two stages of the work form an ongoing observation of the rhythms, spatial compression, and everyday circulation of a mega-city.