To continue our ‘Save Every Lost Human’ project, implemented from Melbourne, PLATI umbrellas will follow our collaborative photographers’ eyes and travel to far corners of this world. They will find lost humans.
First stop is Chongqing, a city surrounded by mountains in Western China, with a population of over 31 million. Let’s start our journey to take a closer look at the people there.
Chongqing is known as a Cyberpunk city. The term ‘Cyberpunk’ describes futuristic, dystopian society, the style that is a combination of low life and high tech.
With countless high-rise buildings, advanced public transport, endless city construction and an obsession with new technology, it is difficult for a lonely individual to feel he belongs. Existence is meaningless in the crowd.
The city has its flip side. Across the river are dilapidated residential areas with people also caught up in daily grind. Everyday, they get lost behind the dense city.
Going deep into the city, passing by some small vendors, and a few snack food stalls, also a well-known part of the city, pedestrians walked toward me hurried, everyone is solely focussed on their livelihoods.
People live in high-density and crowded residential buildings with old exterior walls and full of clothes on the windowsills. Behind modernisation, it seems that they don’t have a broad living space.
Behind the splendour of the city, the neglected are always those tiny individuals. In China, people are always proud of rapid economic development. At how fast the GDP has risen, and countless success stories are told. But are these really related to everyone’s living conditions?
Sometimes we just want to escape behind the city and forget the daily rules. Life has become ironically mundane with more and more technologies built in our lives. The faster pace hasn’t saved any time for the best moments we are searching for. Many people in this city are lost.