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 (Second-Hand Exchanges)

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 (Housing and Mobility)

Another subset of photos relates to the subletting of flats and rooms, exposing the fragmented domestic realities in a city notorious for its housing crisis. These posts reveal personal corners of lived-in spaces, echoing the transience and flux of modern urban living.

Bacchanal before Social Media (Nightlife & Revelry)

Interspersed among the objects and interiors are glimpses of nights out: drinks on a bar counter, the blur of a dance floor, friends posing at pubs or clubs. These ephemeral but intimate snapshots of socializing bring an undercurrent of hedonism, camaraderie, or even loneliness—an insistence on pleasure and community against the backdrop of busy, and often precarious, urban life.

Ties to Inequality & Community

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