The Black Pearl of Beijing

In a second of suspended time throughout worldwide pandemic, an historic capital is stripped all the way down to its deepest anxieties…and to a phantom pearl which will or might not exist.

The Black Pearl of Beijing is a images sequence formed as an city fantasy. Created between 2020 and 2022, it explores town’s fragile stability between fantasy and actuality in the course of the time of lockdowns and collective unease. When day by day life was suspended and the long run unsure, creativeness turned a refuge, and mythology returned as a language to explain what motive couldn’t.

In 2020, Beijing remodeled in a single day. The noise vanished, the streets emptied, air pollution dissolved, revealing uncommon blue skies. Conversation shrank to whispers and cries. Gated communities closed. People exchanged rumors and conspiracy theories, avoiding one another’s gaze.

Weird tales have been exchanged in hushed tones: of the haunted home on Chaoyangmen Street, of a ghost bus quantity 375, of stressed spirits haunting the development of the primary subway line, of the razed and looted Old Summer Palace. These city myths formed a collective creativeness the place reminiscence and fiction intertwined. The black pearl was born as an homage to these tales — suspended between dream and historical past, one thing endlessly sought, by no means discovered.

The sequence is centered across the mysterious object which will have by no means existed, drifting by the work as a phantom concept, connecting the traditional and the trendy, the seen and the hidden. The Black Pearl of Beijing is a poetic map of an invisible metropolis, the place fantasy and reminiscence merge, and the place the search itself turns into the one proof that the black pearl had ever existed.