7th Month Populace (2019 - 2024)

In Chinese folk culture, the seventh month of the lunar calendar is associated with the Hungry Ghost Festival, a period when the boundary between the living and the dead is believed to become permeable. Rituals, offerings, and nightly gatherings transform public spaces into sites of remembrance, fear, reverence, and communal belief.

This project explores the atmosphere and psychological condition surrounding these encounters between the visible and the unseen. Rather than documenting the festival directly, the work reflects on impermanence, mortality, and the fragile nature of human presence.

Photographed through hand-held long exposures and tightly cropped compositions, the images dissolve bodies and gestures into shifting forms of light, movement, and grain. Figures appear suspended between appearance and disappearance, evoking traces that feel at once corporeal and immaterial, like memory, smoke, or ash.

Through these fragmented moments, the series considers how cultural rituals shape our understanding of death, continuity, and coexistence with what can no longer be fully seen.