Entrance
2021. 7
Inkjet Print 60*90 cm
This work documents various entrances of abandoned air-raid shelters in the city where I grew up. It is an attempt to explore on the complex context behind those seemly inconspicuous space in a city and how people interact and live with it.
Air-raid shelters used as combat readiness facilities in wartime, and most of them are hidden in the mountains or underground. One section of air-raid shelter may have many exits. These air-raid shelters documented in my project are in Zhangzhou, Fujian, which is a small coastal city. This project started with my curiosity about the entrance near my home, which is locked by a rusty iron door and covered by plants. Then I found more entrances of the air-raid shelters in this city that are seldom noticed by people.
The seriousness and tension brought by the historical context to these shelters has gradually been eroded by the passage of time. Furthermore, their identities become complex since they started to be modified for other functions, such as underground shops, restaurants, storage rooms and even a temporary home for the tramp. New connections between citizens and the shelters have been established, which is more relaxed and somehow apposite to the tension of wartime. However, those entrances are closed again due to various reasons, and the existence of air-raid shelters are faded away from people’s daily lives. They are standing still by busy streets, in the park or near the residential buildings. Therefore, I attempt to document those entrances of air-raid shelters that hidden in this city in a relatively objective way. Most of Stephen Shore and Alec Soth’s and Deadpan photography provide a sense of distance and alienation perspective, which inspired me to create my work in a similar way. Additionally, I try to show the entrances in the photos as the same way that they exist in people’s live. In those photos, those entrances are ‘dressed up’ into something else and the altered traces adds a filter on them to fit in the environment in a more settled and silent way. They seem to blend into the environment, inconspicuous, but it adds more layers onto a place when the entrances are noticed by the viewer. Those locked entrance are the trace of the past, but also a hint to the future.
