Overseers

Before moving to a big city, I had lived in the countryside near a research institute where my parents worked – a place with nothing more than a lot of farming fields at that time. I often recollect the happy hours I spent alone in elementary school, together with the space of absolute freedom. That was a time when I had plenty of time embracing green nature: buds in spring, sunshine in summer, and thoroughly ripe fruits in the fall. My favorite thing after school was to run to the farm near my school, familiarized myself with the various plants, and observed their growth. My family moved to downtown when I was in high school, where, besides the crowded streets and polluted air, what bothered me most was the surveillance camera at every corner of the city. Even if I walked alone in an empty street, I would feel anxious that I was always being watched. During my university years, new cities kept emerging and old suburbs have now transformed into satellite cities with numerous high rises, while the woods once with flowers turned into fences, street lamps, and poles together with surveillance cameras rotating around their tops. The memory of my childhood has gradually disappeared with them. In my photos, creatures (half plant and half surveillance camera) are the incarnations of the contradiction between the old and new living environments in my mind.

Generally, a plant cannot make up the facial expression of “looking” at you, but those plants in my photos have eyes, which are surveillance cameras instead of biological eyes. When surveillance cameras are placed where they were, they do not look like eyes. When they are mixed with plants, however, their branches and leaves are easily taken as limbs and surveillance cameras are eyeballs at the ends of the limbs. When taking these photos, I never considered to use post production to combine surveillance cameras and plants, because I would like the new creatures to come out of my head and actually exist right here. I want they were already there in actuality before I pushed the shutter button. I used a ladder to get one fruit down, fixed a surveillance camera in the vacancy, and well hid ropes behind. I took all the photos with 50mm lens and allowed the surveillance cameras to produce a “catch light” through a reflector. As a result, the plants and surveillance cameras were replaced by my new species in the photos. Looked at through my angle, these creatures appear to have eyes gazing at you.