These works layer digital fragments gathered from online spaces where everyday life is casually recorded, exchanged, and exposed. Earlier prints draw from social media platforms where London-based users buy and sell second-hand goods, advertise sublet rooms, and share snapshots under hashtags such as #drinking and #nightout. In each large-scale collage, a well-known painting from art history is painstakingly reconstituted from thousands of personal photographs, with every inch of the classical image revealing an anonymous and ephemeral glimpse of modern city life.
The newer work extends this investigation from images to text. Drawing on the “bullet screen” comments — danmu in Chinese, danmaku in Japanese — left by online viewers while listening to the break-up song Afterwards (後來), the work transforms fleeting messages of regret, apology, longing, and unfinished love into a dense visual field. Here, the source material is no longer the casual photograph, but the casual confession: words typed by anonymous users in a moment of emotional recognition, then released into the public flow of the screen.
Although I am not the original maker of all these images or texts, the project reflects on key qualities of photography and its expanded digital condition: evidentiality, accessibility, circulation, and the low barrier to participation. The work takes advantage of the fact that almost everyone can now produce, upload, and distribute traces of their lives through mobile phones and online platforms. A used object photographed for resale, a temporary bedroom posted for sublet, a blurred party snapshot, or a love confession left in a bullet-screen comment all carry a form of evidence. Each fragment appears minor, but collectively they reveal how social, economic, and emotional life is made visible online.
Together, these works invite viewers to consider how everyday digital exchanges — whether about used goods, short-term housing, weekend parties, or private heartbreak — manifest deeper undercurrents of inequality, transience, voyeurism, intimacy, and collective memory. By reassembling fragmented digital footprints into large-scale visual forms, the project brings into focus the tension between collective identity and individual anonymity in an era when nearly every mundane, private, or emotional corner of life 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, UK
Acute Gallery, Roof Art Centre, NO.W x ROOF 屋面艺术中心, Guangzhou, China
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.
‘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 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.
The text in this work is taken from the “bullet screen” comments — danmu in Chinese, danmaku in Japanese — that appear across the screen while people watch the music video of the love song Afterwards (後來). In these floating comments, anonymous viewers leave fragments of confession, regret, apology, longing, and unfinished memory. Some are written to former lovers. Some are addressed to people who may never read them. Others seem to be spoken only to the self.
There is a saying that airports have witnessed more sincere kisses than wedding halls, and that hospital walls have heard more prayers than churches. In a similar way, the bullet screen of a break-up song may contain more apologies than a love letter, more mourning than a diary, and more unfinished farewells than a private conversation. These messages are not formal literature, yet they carry the emotional force of testimony. They document how ordinary people use the internet as a place to confess what could not be said at the right time.
In the original online environment, each comment appears briefly, moving across the video before disappearing. This work slows that movement down and gathers the messages into a dense visual field. The image of a couple is gradually formed through thousands of small sentences, creating a portrait made not from skin, light, or facial detail, but from collective regret. The lovers are both visible and hidden, emerging from the accumulation of other people’s words.
Although the text belongs to many anonymous users, the emotional tone feels strangely intimate. Repeated phrases such as “I still love you,” “I’m sorry,” “I miss you,” and “I should have…” become a kind of collective love letter. Individual pain loses its clear authorship and becomes shared language. The work asks how personal heartbreak becomes public, and how digital platforms turn private emotion into a visible, searchable, and endlessly repeatable archive.
The piece also reflects on the changing relationship between image, text, and memory. The bullet screen is neither simply a comment section nor a subtitle. It is a layer of collective emotion placed directly over the moving image. Viewers do not only watch the song; they watch each other feeling through it. In this sense, Love Letters Afterwards treats the screen as a memorial surface — a place where anonymous users leave traces of love, guilt, and belated understanding.
By compressing these fleeting comments into a single still image, the work transforms temporary online speech into a visual monument. What was once passing, casual, and easily lost becomes heavy, dense, and almost architectural. The image becomes an archive of “afterwards”: after love, after separation, after silence, after the moment when words might still have changed something.
At its centre, the work is about belated emotion. It considers the internet not only as a space of distraction and spectacle, but also as a place where people deposit feelings they can no longer deliver in person. These bullet-screen comments are small acts of mourning. Together, they form a collective confession: a chorus of people speaking too late, yet still needing to speak.
Close up:
Installation at NordArt 2023:
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