After Order

Project statement / English

At first, I didn’t know why I kept photographing these places.

Since 2024, I have often wandered through cities with a camera. I find myself stopping at places that are easy to overlook: unfinished buildings, empty plots hidden behind barriers, roads gradually falling out of use, and neglected corners where traces of everyday life still remain. They are not really landscapes, and nothing particularly dramatic is happening in them. Still, something makes me stop, look for a little longer, and take another photograph.

What is it about these places that keeps drawing me back?

Cities tend to give us the impression that everything has been planned. Roads are meant to lead somewhere. Barriers mark out boundaries. Buildings tell us how to enter, where to stay, and when to leave. But this order does not always hold. Construction stops halfway. Buildings lose their original purpose. People move on.

Then plants begin to grow through cracks in the concrete. Rain and sunlight alter the colour of walls. Objects left behind remain where they were. Boundaries that once seemed clear begin to loosen. The built and the natural, use and abandonment, human absence and human traces—all of them temporarily occupy the same ground.

For a long time, I simply kept taking pictures. I used different cameras, travelled to different places, made photographs, and stored them away on hard drives. At the same time, I kept looking at other photographers’ work online. Everyone else seemed to know exactly where they were going, while my own photographs remained scattered across different folders. The more I looked and the more I photographed, the less certain I became about what I was actually doing.

It was only when I began going back through the photographs and placing them beside one another that I noticed the same kinds of places returning again and again. These pictures had not accumulated entirely by accident. Before I had found a name for them, the camera had already left me a faint trail to follow.

I made this book not primarily to explain these photographs to other people, but to place them together and look at them for myself—to see where I had stopped over the past few years, what had repeatedly caught my attention, and where my way of seeing might be taking me.

This book is therefore not the end of the project, nor is it a conclusion about these places. It is closer to a pause: a stone placed beside the road after walking for a long time. It simply reminds me that I was here, and that this was where I began to understand what I had been looking at all along.

The stone stays where it is. The road continues.

項目介紹 / 中文

我拍這些地方，起初並不知道為什麼。

從 2024 年開始，我常常帶著相機在城市裡走。我會在一些不太起眼的地方停下來：沒有建完的房子、被圍擋隔開的空地、漸漸荒廢的道路，以及那些似乎已經無人照管，卻仍然留有生活痕跡的角落。它們通常不是什麼風景，也沒有正在發生的精彩事件，但我總想多看一會兒，再拍下一張。

這些地方究竟有什麼吸引我？

城市總給人一種一切都經過安排的印象。道路通往某處，圍擋劃出邊界，建築規定人如何進入、停留和離開。可這種秩序並不總能維持下去。建設會停在半途，房屋會失去原來的用途，人會離開。隨後，植物從水泥的縫隙裡生長出來，雨水和陽光改變牆面的顏色，被遺留下來的物件繼續留在原處。原本清楚的邊界逐漸鬆動，人工與自然、使用與廢棄、人的缺席與殘留，暫時擠在了同一片土地上。

很長一段時間裡，我只是不斷地拍。換不同的相機，去不同的地方，拍下照片，再把它們存進硬盤。我也不停地在網上看別人的作品。別人似乎已經有了明確的方向，而我的照片仍然散落在不同的文件夾裡。看得越多，拍得越多，我反而越不知道自己究竟在拍些什麼。

直到我開始把這些照片重新找出來，將它們一張張放在一起，我才發現，有些地方其實早已反覆出現在我的目光裡。那些照片並不是偶然積累起來的。在我還沒有為它們找到名字以前，相機已經替我留下了一條模糊的線索。

我把這本書做出來，首先不是為了向別人說明什麼，而是想把這些照片放在一起，給自己看一看。看看這些年我曾在哪裡停下，什麼東西一次次吸引了我，以及我的目光正在慢慢走向哪裡。

所以，這本書並不是這個項目的終點，也不是對這些地方作出的結論。它更像我在走了很久以後，暫時停下來，在路邊放下的一塊石頭。它只是在提醒我：我曾經來到這裡，並從這裡開始，逐漸意識到自己一直在看什麼。

石頭留在原處，路還會繼續。