Archive of Laochengxiang

Reimagining Deconstructed Landscape

Laochengxiang is Shanghai's historical city center. Situated between the former imperialist enclaves, it was an embodiment of Chinese nationality and a site of resistance in the 19th century. Its cultural landscape mark the coalescence of the imperialist legacy and local culture and effort of modernization. The high mobility of the cross-cultural encounters rendered Laochengxiang its unique spatial structure and textural configuration: the buildings are densely congregated, tangled in vastly different styles; the roads often follow the pattern of waterways, with twists and turns, and less straight.

Starting from the 1990s, Laochengxiang has been experiencing radical demolishment as a result of Shanghai's gentrification progress. The demolishment projects have drastically reconfigured the spatial texture, leaving the local knowledge and lived experience of Laochengxiang unremembered. Since the pandemic, an increasing portion of Laochengxiang's neighborhoods have been expropriated and their residents evicted, creating large blocks of deserted space. [Read more: A Brief History of Laochengxiang]

Archive of Laochengxiang investigates the situatedness and interconnectedness of (de)constructed landscape and its urban imaginary. By 3D-scanning the disappearing Laochengxiang, this project generates spatiotemporal sections of the locale that capture and enlarge the embodied practices, sensual knowledges, and affectual relations of the locality. This project also examines the demolishing and surveillance tactics within the Laochengxiang that entrenched to be symbols of violence, and their reconfigurations of the tangible materiality and collective imagination.

The scans of the locales reenact the imaginable fragmentation of urban landscape that is central to one's experience of a city. These reenactments together conjoin the reminiscent of a walking tour, that as Ingold and Vergunst suggest, “momentarily fuses or brings into phase the otherwise divergent and unsynchronized life trajectories of individual participants into a unified tale of belonging to this place” (2008 p.9).

Welcome to Archive of Laochengxiang, proceed to begin the procession.