2025 (Ongoing), Use Things Until Their End
Chengdu, China
(also images from Chongqing, Lanzhou, Xining and Hanoi and Hue, Vietnam)
Chengdu, China
(also images from Chongqing, Lanzhou, Xining and Hanoi and Hue, Vietnam)
Use Things Until Their End is an ongoing photographic project documenting the performance of the lived landscape around Chengdu, China. Impermanence unfolds through rhythms of change—continually written, scraped back, and marked again—an ongoing process of transformation.
Taking inspiration from the Chinese idiom 物尽其用 (to use resources to their full potential so that nothing is wasted), I became attentive to the quiet, informal improvisations and patterns that emerge from the accumulation of circulating materials. Found in the everyday—temporary fixes, stacked items, remnants, and traces on walls—these materials occupy a liminal space, suspended between states of utility and reuse, presence and absence. In their stillness, the images hold a residual weight, gesturing silently toward embedded narratives of identity, consumption, necessity, and an unspoken language of human adaptation.
This resourcefulness reveals a creative negotiation with space, shaped by shifting ecological, socio-political and environmental conditions. The images capture these informal sculptures in their current, incomplete state, representing the ongoing dialogue between material consumption, societal adaptation and the transformation of the lived landscape.
Taking inspiration from the Chinese idiom 物尽其用 (to use resources to their full potential so that nothing is wasted), I became attentive to the quiet, informal improvisations and patterns that emerge from the accumulation of circulating materials. Found in the everyday—temporary fixes, stacked items, remnants, and traces on walls—these materials occupy a liminal space, suspended between states of utility and reuse, presence and absence. In their stillness, the images hold a residual weight, gesturing silently toward embedded narratives of identity, consumption, necessity, and an unspoken language of human adaptation.
This resourcefulness reveals a creative negotiation with space, shaped by shifting ecological, socio-political and environmental conditions. The images capture these informal sculptures in their current, incomplete state, representing the ongoing dialogue between material consumption, societal adaptation and the transformation of the lived landscape.