Improvised Space
In the spring of 2026, I visited rural kitchens in villages around my hometown Chongqing to collect used kitchenware for a sculpture project. During these visits, I became increasingly drawn to the interior spaces of the old stone-and-timber houses in the villages. In contrast to the rationality of urban spatial design, which emphasizes efficiency and standardization, these spaces appear to be spontaneously organized in response to immediate needs, accumulating layers of provisional arrangements over time. The functional logic that assigns objects to clearly defined uses in modernist architecture seems to dissolve here, as the boundaries between cooking, storage and production remain fluid and interwoven.
Through photography, I seek to register the vibrance of a vernacular spatial practice that temporarily eludes the discipline of modernism. The worn surfaces, displaced objects and improvised structures become self-transforming repositories of the rhythms of everyday, which continue to inhabit the space after activities have ceased. What appears as disorder thus becomes a vivid form of spatial memory that faces complete erasure in the process of rapid urbanization.
In these fragments of precarious invention, domestic spaces in a Chinese rural context - often shaped by gendered divisions and economic constraints - become sites of inventiveness and improvisation.
This project is made possible by the generous support of the Reisma van den Burg Cultuurfonds.
In the spring of 2026, I visited rural kitchens in villages around my hometown Chongqing to collect used kitchenware for a sculpture project. During these visits, I became increasingly drawn to the interior spaces of the old stone-and-timber houses in the villages. In contrast to the rationality of urban spatial design, which emphasizes efficiency and standardization, these spaces appear to be spontaneously organized in response to immediate needs, accumulating layers of provisional arrangements over time. The functional logic that assigns objects to clearly defined uses in modernist architecture seems to dissolve here, as the boundaries between cooking, storage and production remain fluid and interwoven.
Through photography, I seek to register the vibrance of a vernacular spatial practice that temporarily eludes the discipline of modernism. The worn surfaces, displaced objects and improvised structures become self-transforming repositories of the rhythms of everyday, which continue to inhabit the space after activities have ceased. What appears as disorder thus becomes a vivid form of spatial memory that faces complete erasure in the process of rapid urbanization.
In these fragments of precarious invention, domestic spaces in a Chinese rural context - often shaped by gendered divisions and economic constraints - become sites of inventiveness and improvisation.
This project is made possible by the generous support of the Reisma van den Burg Cultuurfonds.
