Lane 138, Changyang Rd: a community landscape for a demolishing neighborhood

Exhibition: Photo print, video installation and original copies of Polaroids and contact sheet print

Lane 138, Changyang Road was once a residential community in Shanghai. In April 2021, residents received notice that the neighborhood would be demolished. Over the following three months, families gradually packed their belongings, emptied their homes, and prepared to leave a place many of them had called home for decades. By the end of July, the community had disappeared.

Initiated by Zhen Lu and Yikai Luc Wu, this project began as an attempt to create portraits of the residents before they moved away. What started as a photographic record soon became something more personal.

For Lu, who spent much of her childhood here at her grandmother's home, the project became a way of saying goodbye. Together, they stepped through doors they had previously only passed by, spoke with neighbors they had rarely spoken to, and listened to stories that had quietly existed around them for years. In the brief period before the community dispersed, strangers became familiar, acquaintances became friends, and fragments of individual memories slowly formed a collective portrait of the neighborhood.

The photographs are less a record of a disappearing place than of the people who gave it meaning. Taken during the community's final months, they preserve not only faces and homes, but also a moment when residents found themselves reflecting on what they would carry with them after the place itself was gone.

As buildings vanished and families moved on, what remained were the stories, relationships, and shared memories that had always existed beneath the surface of everyday life.

Aug. 2022 @ Gallery Individualism