When You Play Here

2024
Photography


In the time I went back to my hometown, I noticed the sheer number of public children's play facilities in this obscure inland city in southeastern China. They appear in astonishing shapes and vibrant colors, with no instructions, no rules, sometimes puzzling, sometimes following certain conventions, but ultimately leaving the interpretation to the children. They appear in multiple urban spaces: parks, underneath apartment buildings, shopping malls, and so on. Children always tend to use the playsets in unexpected ways—they are more likely to stand or climb on these delicate, colorful tubes than two people sitting at the ends of a teeter-totter. These childlike structures compose an alternative cityscape—one that juggles a commodified appearance with the openness of participation. The children's participation and rewriting of this space carries the vision of the emancipation of play: inventing autonomous rules within established realms and making new games in the unconscious.