Wandering Dogs 游犬
Sculpture / Photography / Installation
2020-2021
Urban planners often designate urban–rural junctions as zones requiring intervention—ambiguous territories where formal systems strain to organize informal rhythms. In the peripheries of Chengdu, I encountered social patterns distinct from the city’s commercial core. Two-yuan shops—tiny stores selling low-cost items—are increasingly pressured by e-commerce, real estate inflation, and changing consumer habits.
The project title, Wandering Dogs, references the stray dog communities that inhabit these transitional spaces. Like the shops, they persist at the margins of urban growth—adaptable, precarious, and continually displaced. Both dogs and stores are social actors navigating the turbulence of uneven development.
I collected toys, craft supplies, tools, and decorative items from these stores and reassembled them into sculptural forms through stacking, knotting, and improvised binding. The materials retain their original color, gloss, and fragility, while the compositions intentionally evoke instability. These makeshift assemblages reflect the transitory life cycles of the goods themselves, and of the spaces they once inhabited.
Each sculpture was photographed using large-format film with controlled flash—creating a deliberate distance between viewer and object. The flash isolates the forms from their surroundings, presenting them as artifacts suspended between consumption and memory. In this way, the photographs do not simply document, but propose a slowed mode of looking—an archaeology of the overlooked. As urbanization accelerates, these fragile structures mark a moment when circulation, value, and visibility are being rearranged in real time.
城市规划常将城乡结合部视为“待干预”区域——在这里，制度性的规划逻辑试图覆盖非正式的生存节奏。我在成都的城市边缘地带，观察到一套区别于商业核心的社会互动模式。两元店——那些售卖廉价日用品的小型商铺——正受到电商冲击、租金上涨和消费结构变化的多重挤压。
作品名“游犬”取自这些区域中流浪狗的存在状态。它们和两元店一样，游离在城市发展逻辑之外——灵活、脆弱、易被驱赶，却持续地“在场”。它们既是被忽略的生物，也是城市节奏中的游牧者，承载着某种非正式的共同体潜力。
我从这些商铺收集玩具、手工材料、工具与装饰物，进行堆叠、捆扎、穿插、组装，构成不稳定的雕塑装置。原始材料的色泽、质感和脆弱性被刻意保留，让这些物品带着它们的时间感进入新的构型。每一件作品都像是曾经流通过的商品之幽灵，体现着它们所处空间的转瞬即逝。
我使用大画幅摄影与闪光灯拍摄这些雕塑，试图营造一种“观察距离”。闪光使它们从背景中抽离，悬置于消费与记忆之间的张力状态。这些照片并非单纯记录，更像是一种慢速凝视的提议——对被忽视之物的“田野考古”。在城市化不断加速的当下，这些脆弱的结构见证了某种关于流通、价值与可见性正在实时重组的时刻。
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