Xiangdong Li

I started back with a newspaper from my childhood to trace my geographical perception of Shenzhen. At the beginning of the project, I could not project the concept of hometown on this emerging immigrant city. At the same time, I did not see the city as a spiritual object to be anchored in. In my identity, my hometown was a vague and ambiguous place, it could be the birthplace of my father or mother, or even the city where I was attending university.

I was forced to stay in the city for a while when the epidemic broke out in early 2020. I began to think about my relationship with the city, which was my physical home, but which did not fully play the role of a 'homeland' in the spiritual sense.With these questions in mind, I began to explore the city, following the personalized clues left by my predecessors, such as oral narratives, old photographs, documents, etc. I photographed some of the landscape of Shenzhen and visited my peers who also lacked an identity, and in the process of asking questions about the city and exploring it with images, I slowly found my missing identity.

I was born in this city, but I always leave the city to go back home during New Year's. The people there always speak a dialect I do not understand.But I can't see this city as my spiritual hometown, it doesn't have a rich cultural heritage, nor does it have its own dialect. If this was home, then what was the distant village that I went back to every year for New Year's Eve?

With these questions in mind, I set out to do some research on Shenzhen, first visiting some of the immigrants who had arrived earlier in the city, some from the north of Shenzhen, some from the south and some from the north-east.I collected from them many photographs and documents about the early days of Shenzhen and heard a lot about the history of the city, ranging from government policies to folklore to stories of spirits.These old photographs are more than mere images, they are objects that have been used, preserved and viewed, and these warm images transport me to a time and place before I was born.The identity information carried by the people in the photographs has been deliberately erased to create an effect that seems to glow.I wanted the viewer to be less attracted to the expressions or the looks of the people and more to focus on the context of the photograph and the fact that 'the subject is in a certain field'.With these clues in mind, I began to wander the streets of Shenzhen, a city where, if you walk south, you encounter a tangible borderline that stretches from the suburbs to the city and back again.

As you begin to photograph along the border, you will find many conflicting ideologies, such as the use of traditional and simplified Chinese characters, changes in architectural styles and the emergence of border industries.For example, taxi drivers travelling between Hong Kong and Shenzhen often have two sets of licences, one black and one blue, but these conflicts are again tacitly accepted in our ideology.As I walked along the border, I was told that Shenzhen once had a 'second line gate', the first line gate being the border between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, while the second line gate was a physical border that separated Shenzhen from its neighbours when it was first established, with the same long stretches of barbed wire and kiosks as the first line gate, and twelve border checkpoints where people had to take identification to enter and leave. The border checkpoints were set up in the same way as the first line.

These border posts were slowly abandoned after I was born, the former patrol road became a greenway, the posts became gazebos and the border checkpoints became bus stops. The borderline has disappeared, but the landscape that remains reminds me that a physical border once existed.As I walked around the city and continued to search for my 'roots' in Shenzhen, I visited many of my elders who were related to me, trying to find out why I existed here.They were all happy to talk about their early experiences in Shenzhen, but they always mentioned their hometowns with excitement, and even after decades of living in Shenzhen, their 'nostalgia' always belonged to a distant place.

But what about my nostalgia?

At the same time, I visited some of my peers who were born in Shenzhen, like me, and shared with them their common confusion and asked them to write some self-reports about their identity.Some of them thought that Shenzhen was not their hometown, while others thought that they had two hometowns and Shenzhen was only one of them. In the process of collecting old photographs, the 'Window of the World' appeared frequently in the albums of various families. I tried to find out what they had to say about Shenzhen.I tried to understand their stories about Shenzhen and the area in which they lived, and chose some representative locations to take environmental portraits of them.In the process of collecting old photographs, the 'Window of the World' appeared frequently in the albums of various families, and in the beginning of Shenzhen's development, the only major recreational attraction in the city was the Window of the World, a park with famous sites from all over China and the world. It was a miniature size, but that didn't stop people from taking photos with them.

I followed my collection of photographs to this one of the only early entertainment attractions in Shenzhen, and I walked through them as if they still held remnants of the past century.I tried to use photography as a medium to solve my perplexing problems, but photography is not deceptive, and at the same time it is the most deceptive of all.I can only get to know the distant past through old photographs and documents, and look for those sparse clues in the present.As the project progresses, I learn about Shenzhen's past, present and future, and the identity that comes with a sense of belonging gradually takes shape, and I slowly find the missing part of my own 'nostalgia'.