This Is a Long Story

The Long Image Series is an ongoing observation of everyday collective scenes in China’s urban public spaces. Photographed in subways, railway stations, parks, shopping malls, and city streets, the works depict delivery workers waiting for orders or commuting home, crowds moving through railway stations during the Spring Festival travel season, residents gathering around public dance performances, ordinary people taking selfies, and strangers who briefly assemble before dispersing again.

These figures rarely occupy the foreground of official or spectacular representations of the city, yet together they form its most immediate and recognizable expression. Their gestures, clothing, movements, and physical proximity reveal the rhythms through which urban life is organized. Transportation, labor, consumption, and public order bring separate individuals into temporary proximity, allowing each person to retain a private purpose while becoming part of a larger collective image.

Through sequential photography, image stitching, and vertical extension, I reorganize fleeting and fragmented moments into images that unfold over time. The elongated format draws on the experience of scrolling through mobile screens and digital feeds, transforming the act of viewing into a gradual process. Figures appear, repeat, overlap, and eventually move out of sight, producing a visual rhythm shaped by movement, queuing, waiting, and circulation.

The title This Is a Long Story refers both to the physical length of the images and to the lives behind these scenes, which cannot be contained within a single photograph. The series gives extended visibility to ordinary, non-monumental moments that are easily overlooked, while examining the complex relationship between individual experience and collective structure in contemporary Chinese urban life.