Residual Smoke II

2023, archival inkjet print, 90 × 65 cm

For most of the year, the village remains silent. “Hollow villages” refers to a widespread condition in rural China shaped by decades of urbanization and migration, where villages remain physically intact but are increasingly emptied of communal life, ritual, and custom.

In Residual Smoke II, fireworks are removed from their cultural setting and placed within these hollowed landscapes, where they take on an atmosphere of absurdity and estrangement. What remains are fields, village houses, and residual smoke: a lingering trace of a disappearing rural world, and of the younger generation’s conflicted nostalgia toward it.