Our World Our Park
我们的世界公园
During the 1990s, before the dawn of the economic boom and the surge of globalization in China, childhood in Beijing and Shenzhen often revolved around two iconic theme parks: the World Park in Beijing and the Window of the World in Shenzhen. For a generation of Chinese families, these parks encapsulated dreams of the world in miniature. To this day, my family still cherishes a photograph taken with a "point-and-shoot" camera—a portrait of my parents and me in the World Park. Back then, like most Chinese households, our imagination of the world largely centered on the park's scaled-down landmarks. Little did we anticipate how profoundly our relationship with the world would transform over the next three decades.
In late 2004, my father was assigned to Bangkok, Thailand, marking the beginning of his 20-year career as a foreign correspondent for television. Over the years, his work took him to more than 80 countries, allowing him to capture, with his camera, the real-life landscapes that the World Park's miniatures once symbolized. As he reported on wars, coups, earthquakes, and tsunamis, his presence in my eyes became intertwined with the vast and turbulent world stage he documented.
(2024), a three-channel 13-minute video installation
For the past two decades, my family has maintained a unique structure: I grew up in the midst of my parents' transnational, long-distance relationship, a bond sustained across borders. As I came of age, I gradually took over my father's camera and became a documentary filmmaker. By 2022, after moving to the Netherlands, our family of three had found ourselves scattered across three time zones—Western Europe (UTC+1), Eastern China (UTC+8), and Eastern Brazil (UTC-3)—almost dividing the globe into three equal segments. Our closeness as a family, paradoxically, has always been nurtured from afar.
Looking back, the World Park was more than a miniaturization of the world; it was, in a sense, a premonition of my family's journey. Revisiting our old family album, the diminutive Parthenon and the pint-sized pyramids seem to whisper stories of their own—a collection of fairy tales for eras, macro or micro.
Guided by this photographic archive, I began to trace the faded landmarks behind our images: the Dutch windmills, the Parthenon in Athens, Big Ben in London, the Rialto Bridge in Venice, and Manhattan’s Twin Towers still standing. I then juxtaposed these with television footage of my father reporting on-site from their corresponding real-world cities between 2004 and 2024. Finally, armed with my own camera, I returned to the World Park to re-examine these once-glorious replicas through a cinematic lens, capturing their present state in my style.
The result is a dynamic triptych: on the left, our family snapshots from the 1990s at the World Park; in the center, my father's global reporting footage; and on the right, contemporary images of the park's replicas. Through this cross-screen montage, the project weaves a narrative that oscillates between reality, simulacra, reflection, and imitation. It stands as a living album—a chronicle of the memory of one family, a shared memory of two generations, and a collective memory in a chapter of our history.
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2024 solo exhibition The World. The Park. at Fang Suo Commune (Beijing, Guangzhou, Xi’an, Sanya)
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