■ 2025
■ Portable City No.1
Quzhou
Tencent News (2021) ‘The Disappearance of Newsstands in Shanghai’ [上海报刊亭的消亡], Tencent News, 5 November. Available at: https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20211105A04YGG00 (Accessed: 3 May 2025).
Let‘s start with Quzhou, where I grew up.
Quzhou is a small city of Zhejiang province in China. I grew up there. What I remember most is not any famous building or landmark. It is a newsstand I went to every day after school. It sold comics and small magazines.
It is gone now. It was removed as part of a national urban cleanliness policy.
Between 2008 and 2013, over ten thousand newsstands disappeared from Chinese cities.
In the model, I tried to animate how this kind of loss feels. When someone walks close, the lines pull together into the shape of the newsstand. Then dissolve again. It forms only when someone remembers to look.
The model is not about nostalgia for one object. It is about what kind of memory cities decide to protect, and whose everyday life counts as worth preserving.
Quzhou is a small city of Zhejiang province in China. I grew up there. What I remember most is not any famous building or landmark. It is a newsstand I went to every day after school. It sold comics and small magazines.
It is gone now. It was removed as part of a national urban cleanliness policy.
Between 2008 and 2013, over ten thousand newsstands disappeared from Chinese cities.
In the model, I tried to animate how this kind of loss feels. When someone walks close, the lines pull together into the shape of the newsstand. Then dissolve again. It forms only when someone remembers to look.
The model is not about nostalgia for one object. It is about what kind of memory cities decide to protect, and whose everyday life counts as worth preserving.
■ Portable City No.2
Hangzhou
West Lake was part of my daily rhythm.
I walked by it after dinner, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends.
In my model, West Lake sits in the middle of the cube. Above it: glass towers and oversized lotus blossoms, the city performing its modernity.
Below: submerged rooftops and narrow streets, the Hangzhou I grew up in.
When a viewer approaches, the water level drops and the old buildings reappear briefly. When the viewer moves away, the lake rises and covers them again.
The past is not destroyed. It is kept underwater, and becomes visible only when someone insists on looking. Both versions of the city are real. My body just belongs more in the part that is now submerged.
■ Portable City No.3
Los Angeles
In the cities outside China, I kept returning to Chinatowns and Chinese-run spaces.
Not because they are the same, but because each one reveals a different condition of migrant life. Los Angeles made this especially clear.
Here I focused on one object: the Bruce Lee statue in Chinatown.
For many visitors, it works as a simple symbol. This is Chinese. Take a photo, then move on.
In the model, the statue stands alone. When a viewer approaches, a dragon coils around it. When they leave, it breaks apart.
This came from my own experience of LA Chinatown. For most of the year, it felt half-empty and tired. Then during festivals, it suddenly came alive with drums and dragon dances. Powerful, but temporary.
So the question becomes: who is this performance really for? Tourists, the community itself, or the city' s imagination of Chinese culture?
Not because they are the same, but because each one reveals a different condition of migrant life. Los Angeles made this especially clear.
Here I focused on one object: the Bruce Lee statue in Chinatown.
For many visitors, it works as a simple symbol. This is Chinese. Take a photo, then move on.
In the model, the statue stands alone. When a viewer approaches, a dragon coils around it. When they leave, it breaks apart.
This came from my own experience of LA Chinatown. For most of the year, it felt half-empty and tired. Then during festivals, it suddenly came alive with drums and dragon dances. Powerful, but temporary.
So the question becomes: who is this performance really for? Tourists, the community itself, or the city' s imagination of Chinese culture?
■ Portable City No.4
Tokyo
Some characters look identical and mean completely different things.
In the model, a sakura tree stands at the centre. When a viewer comes close, the petals begin drifting upward. Chinese and Japanese characters appear between them, drifting, overlapping, never fully settling into meaning.
Migration is not only about moving bodies across borders. It is about moving through layers of meaning that do not fully align.
■ Portable City No.5
Glasgow
Wkong (n.d.) Glasgow Chinatown [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10600265 (Accessed: 3 May 2025)
Glasgow once had a Chinatown. A small indoor market, a gate, some shops.
By the time I learned about it, it was mostly gone. The building remained, but the life had left. The city does not talk about it.
In the model, everything begins dark and very still.
When a viewer approaches, thin lines of light start to fall as rain. As the rain continues, the outline of a Chinese gate slowly brightens
If the viewer steps back, the rain stops. The gate fades.
Doreen Massey writes that space is a simultaneity of stories-so-far.
Glasgow's Chinese history is not gone. It has just been made invisible.
The model asks someone to stand in the rain long enough to find it.
By the time I learned about it, it was mostly gone. The building remained, but the life had left. The city does not talk about it.
In the model, everything begins dark and very still.
When a viewer approaches, thin lines of light start to fall as rain. As the rain continues, the outline of a Chinese gate slowly brightens
If the viewer steps back, the rain stops. The gate fades.
Doreen Massey writes that space is a simultaneity of stories-so-far.
Glasgow's Chinese history is not gone. It has just been made invisible.
The model asks someone to stand in the rain long enough to find it.
■ Portable City No.6
London
Wikimedia Commons (n.d.) London Chinatown [Photograph]. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=218439 (Accessed: 3 May 2025).
London's Chinatown feels like the opposite of Glasgow's. It is loud, saturated, and always on. Red lanterns, restaurant signs, tourists, queues.
Exciting, but also exhausting.
It feels less like a place to live and more like a stage that never closes.
In the model, the cube fills with oversized lanterns.
When a viewer approaches, they light up brighter and brighter. When the viewer leaves, they dim again.
If Glasgow is about erasure through forgetting, London is about erasure through over-visibility.
Both place conditions on belonging.
So the model asks: what does it mean to live inside a lantern that is always on?
Exciting, but also exhausting.
It feels less like a place to live and more like a stage that never closes.
In the model, the cube fills with oversized lanterns.
When a viewer approaches, they light up brighter and brighter. When the viewer leaves, they dim again.
If Glasgow is about erasure through forgetting, London is about erasure through over-visibility.
Both place conditions on belonging.
So the model asks: what does it mean to live inside a lantern that is always on?
■ Portable City No.7
Edinburgh
Point-cloud-derived visual of four Chinese supermarkets, in the Edinburgh city-model
Edinburgh is where I live now.
Edinburgh Castle is one of the most photographed buildings in Scotland.
The Chinese supermarkets nearby are almost invisible at the level of the city’s self-image.
But they are what make the city liveable for me.
The tofu, the spices, the labels I do not need to translate.
In the model, the supermarkets orbit the castle as particles.
When someone walks past, the particles gather into outlines.
They briefly become whole. Then they drift apart again.
My city centre is not the same as the tourist map. These small, quiet shops are my private landmarks.
They are what I think of as portable anchors.
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From 2025, I built 7 city models. Each one began not from a blueprint but from a feeling: a memory so specific and ordinary that it would never appear in an official archive. Together they form what I think of as a spatial archive: not a record of how these cities look, but of how they feel when you carry them with you. How absence becomes visible.
Migration is often talked about in terms of ambition or opportunity. For many women, it is also about leaving something behind: social expectations, narrowly defined roles, the pressure to conform to a life that was not of your own design.
The cities I made are not just memories. They are places where identity, gender, and belonging were all in question at the same time.
The practice is now moving into its participatory stage.
The aim is to set the models in conversation with other women's experiences of migration and urban life.
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