Calling to The Past

35mm, 2020, Guangzhou, China

I found a 35mm B&W film roll during the one-month lock down in early 2020 China, when everything took a pause. I was reorganizing everything at home, as if some sense of order could be salvaged from the chaos. I had bougt the film years ago but never been wanting to open it. B&W to me signified lost and disappearance, something irretrievable. Before the pandemic, I never associated my life with such.

After school resumed in person, life seemed to return to normal. For the first time I felt an urge to capture something as fleeting as that brief “abnormal” period, just like the old neighborhoods of Guangzhou, where Cantonese could still be heard on the streets and vendors shouted daily deals outside their shops – a scene that had long vanished from the rapidly modernized downtown where I grew up.

I loaded the film roll, picked up the camera, and wandered into the streets of Liwan District (荔湾区), ready to get lost: