The Garden of Earthly Delights_LDN2022

The Garden of Earthly Delights_LDN2022

These three mosaic prints layer digital fragments gathered from social media platforms where London-based users buy and sell second-hand goods, sublet living spaces, and share snapshots under hashtags like #drinking and #nightout. In each large-scale collage, a well-known painting from art history is painstakingly reconstituted from thousands of these personal photos—every inch of the classical image revealing an anonymous, ephemeral glimpse of modern city life.

The Garden of Earthly Delights_LDN2022

Many of the smaller images come from online groups used by Londoners to trade furniture, clothing, textbooks, and other everyday items. Their mundane nature underscores economic improvisation—people juggling personal finances or decluttering for a move—highlighting the gap between rich and poor, with second-hand traded item, as well as hinting at the shifting nature of ownership in our age of constant consumption. Each image triggers Sophie Calle-style voyeurism: who is the vendor? What are the stories behind all those poor-quality, mediocre photos of used things? Could a person be defined by the objects we buy and sell? The nervous thrill of observing people's private lives through the social media’s 'peephole', which keenly tracks the daily changes, mixes with the moral dilemma of plundering real life for the sake of art which is not immune to the voyeurism embedded in our online culture. I use Hieronymus Bosch's “The Garden of Earthly Delights” as the base of his work, using archival photographs and collages in a Dadaistic contrast to the early triptych form. I try to explore the relationship between consumption and identity while faithfully documenting and analysing real life, as well as provoking discussions of privacy and boundaries.

The Tower of Subletting Rooms

‘Tower of Sublet Rooms’ presents a visual exploration of temporary housing in London through a photo collage of a large number of adverts for sublets on social media. Mimicking the pictorial and architectural form of the masterpiece ‘Tower of Babel’, each image in the collage shows a small room available for temporary living. The images vary in quality and personal style, creating a mosaic that reflects the diversity of economic conditions and personal stories. The tower block structure of the artwork symbolises the chaos and instability of city life, and the different decor and state of maintenance of each room suggests the lives of individuals struggling to find their place in the city. The artwork delves into themes of anonymity and temporality, challenging the viewer to consider the story behind each sublet space. The images, though small and numerous, offer a glimpse into private worlds, provoking thoughts about the people who pass through these rooms. The collage technique enhances the fragmentation and impermanence of the work, suggesting the changing identities of city dwellers and their ephemeral connections to the spaces they inhabit. The work not only captures the essence of the dynamics of urban life, but also serves as a commentary on the human condition in the modern metropolis, echoing the historical narrative of the Tower of Babel with a contemporary twist.

Bacchanalian Revel of Digital Echoes

Bacchanalian Revel of Digital Echoes emerges as a sweeping commentary on contemporary party culture, woven together from countless social media images sourced with keywords such as “drinking,” “party,” and “alcohol god.” Taking its overall compositional cue from the 17th-century painting A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term of Pan, the work reimagines Poussin’s depiction of mythic revelry through the lens of today’s online sharing frenzy. Each small photo—ranging from rowdy club scenes to quiet toasts—acts as a modern stand-in for the figures and details in the original masterpiece.

Just as the classical painting portrayed a throng of celebrants around a statue of Pan, so too does this mosaic suggest a collective chorus of human experiences bound by the pursuit of celebration. The images, drawn from an algorithmic swirl of hashtags and fleeting digital posts, reflect a tapestry of personal stories: nights out with friends, spontaneous revels, and the innumerable ways people across the globe raise their glasses. The piece thus juxtaposes the timeless spirit of Bacchic abandon with the immediacy and transience of internet culture.

Despite their often lighthearted content, these micro-glimpses into modern festivity collectively point toward a deeper reflection on social identity, communal bonding, and the ways our public performance of leisure can both unite and isolate. By merging the mythic with the digital, the artwork underscores the enduring nature of revelry across epochs—and invites viewers to consider how our online world reshapes a centuries-old tradition of collective celebration.

By assembling these personal “shards” into reimagined masterpieces, the project simultaneously celebrates and critiques the social fabric that emerges from everyday online interactions:

Economic and Social Disparities: The existence of these second-hand markets and sublets highlights the growing financial pressures in a city where affording a home can be a struggle. Some people sell items out of necessity, while others simply wish to upgrade—a tension made tangible through the abundance of low-quality phone photos of goods in small, cramped rooms or unadorned corners.

Privacy & Voyeurism: Re-purposing user-uploaded images—however mundane—raises questions about how comfortable we’ve become with exposing private lives in public online domains. From the vantage point of the viewer, there’s an inevitable voyeuristic thrill in peeking into strangers’ living rooms, bedrooms, or nights out—mirroring the blurred lines between self-expression, social surveillance, and digital exploitation.

Community & Connection: Beyond the transactional nature of these images, the project hints at pockets of mutual aid, recycling, and spontaneous solidarity. A subletted room might be a lifeline for someone new to the city; a second-hand sofa might start a new story in a different household. The mosaic form itself becomes a visual metaphor for interdependence: each individual image is incomplete until woven into a collective narrative.

Together, these three collages invite viewers to reflect on how everyday online exchanges—be they about used goods, short-term housing, or weekend parties—manifest deeper undercurrents of inequality, transience, and voyeurism. Reassembling these fragmented digital footprints into familiar, centuries-old artistic compositions brings into sharp focus the tension between collective identity and individual anonymity in an era when nearly every mundane corner of our lives can be put on display.

exhibited at:

NordArt 2023, Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Büdelsdorf/Rendsburg, Germany

I SAW IT ON TV - International Body of Arts, Copeland Gallery, London, United Kingdom

Acute Gallery, Roof Art Centre, NO.W x ROOF 屋面艺术中心, Guangzhou, China