WHAT BROUGHT US TO THIS
What Brought Us to This: A Visual Log of 2022 Shanghai Lockdown is a book recording and critiquing the dramatic events caused by China's harsh zero-COVID policies. The whole country is struggling under authoritarian control and we've seen many absurd tragedies happening over and over again.
Daydream
44 pages | Graphic on Paper, reproduced with inkjet | 2019
[Cover Chinese Translation]
Turning off the alarm clock at eleven o'clock. Frying the egg took about five minutes. Forgetting that yesterday's dream took only three seconds, and it took 18 minutes to walk to the subway station. On the way, there were wight dogs, five babies, twenty-five pigeons and nine squirrels. The subway is arriving in three minutes...
This pocket size book is dedicated to the 18-year-old Chinese NYU student who threw himself in front of the NYC L train. The accident happened in the station in front of my apartment. Sometimes I wonder, if he lived in the same neighborhood, walked the same street as I did.
NYC's subway stations always give me a fear of falling into the track for there's no fence between the platform and the tunnel where the tracks are.
In this small book, I try to recreate the morning when he walked to the station from his home, standing on the edge of the platform, waiting for the train to arrive. The formatting of the images are to help creating a movie-like reading experience. The flipping of the pages is also part of the design for better experiencing this story. So the digital version of the book is inevitably a compromised one.