42 x 60 cm

Collage on a lightbox, later printed on rice paper

This work originates from my photographic record of the final weeks of the “Covid-zero policy” in China, which lasted from 2020 to 2023 and kept the country isolated from the world, even after the global reopening. Drawing on photographs captured from my window and of streets emptied by lockdown, I recreate the dystopian atmosphere of that time: mandatory daily tests, health QR codes (in Chinese, Jiànkāngbǎo) necessary to enter any place, and silent neighborhoods. The images — resulting from the overlay of photographs on a lightbox — are printed on rice paper, an ancestral material in Chinese tradition, and culminate in a narrative that fuses documentation with a phantasmagorical quality. Light, doubly present in the work, reinforces the notion that to photograph is also to illuminate, in an attempt at bringing to visibility both the hidden story of those days and the materiality of the process itself.