Past Future

There is a magical city in China called Yumen. This 4,000-year-old city began exploiting the local oil resources in 1949. In 2003, as the resources were depleted, the local government was relocated to another location and the city became a huge empty city. This made me aware of the consequences and effects of the climate crisis. I was inspired by Sheila Zhao's secondary work on old photographs and used a combination of old photographs and photographs I had taken to express the problem. I simply photographed an empty scene in the area and pasted over it old photographs of Yumen that I had found: these were from the period when Yumen was at its peak. The aim is to remind people of the changes that have taken place in the area by putting different times of the same place together for comparison. Through this work, I hope to make this phenomenon visible while reminding people that what we thought was the distant future may already be happening.