Amid the quickening variations of society, the countryside has become a small line of text quietly pushed to the margin, gradually overlaid by the city’s glare. “Compressed modernity” is not an abstract term; it unfolds concretely and coolly on swept dirt roads, in sealed door seams, and in ponds about to be filled. As many indigenous residents turn toward the city, the tools and traces of rural life have their edges worn down by time. Along this compressed timeline, I try to gather fragments still warm to the touch—elements abandoned yet saturated with the marks of living—so they can leave tactile memories and emotional clues on paper and in images.
Amid the quickening variations of society, the countryside has become a small line of text quietly pushed to the margin, gradually overlaid by the city’s glare. “Compressed modernity” is not an abstract term; it unfolds concretely and coolly on swept dirt roads, in sealed door seams, and in ponds about to be filled. As many indigenous residents turn toward the city, the tools and traces of rural life have their edges worn down by time. Along this compressed timeline, I try to gather fragments still warm to the touch—elements abandoned yet saturated with the marks of living—so they can leave tactile memories and emotional clues on paper and in images.
To that end, I select three emblematic elements to index former bonds of space and belonging: aging doors to which no one returns, earthen ground soon to be paved with cement, and ponds soon to be leveled. Methodologically, I take rubbings of roads on extra-long scrolls of xuan paper, letting “walking” and “touching” happen at once; I record the changes of ponds over the span of a year, letting the waterline become the most honest register of time; and I photograph household doors that wait but are no longer opened. In the crossings of these three threads, I hope to inscribe both the yearning for new beginnings and the hesitations and tug-of-war within urban–rural divides, settling this complexity into ink and paper.
In book design, the interior extends the notion of “rubbing the road,” constructing a reading path through a continuously unfolding long scroll that turns the “road” from a conceptual medium into a tangible page-turning experience. The cover and back are wrapped in traditionally hand-dyed linen; the rough grain and the faint sheen of fibers recall the countryside’s natural breath. Structurally, a dual-cover with special folding is used: at the start of each chapter, an AB double cover separates the photographs like two doors; when readers push open this “pair of doors,” the complete long scroll unfurls before them like a road. On the content level, I integrate AI-driven analyses to generate time-based waterline data for different ponds, placing rational measurement alongside affective narration; thus, old doors, dirt roads, and ponds are woven into a book with both tactility and structural logic.
Through this design language and the reconstitution of objects, I hope to leave textures that can be remembered amid rapid change—rough and singular, like linen in the wind, like earth not yet set. The question may not be grand: as the city’s outline keeps expanding, can we still remember the social memories that have grown with the years—and, in remembering, find a way to keep going?