City Skin: Placing Traces
City Skin: Placing Traces is a photographic installation that reimagines the invisible residues of human life within the rapidly urbanisation landscapes of city spaces. Through a series of black-and-white photographs layered with temperature sensitive pigment, the work transforms the act of viewing into an act of interaction — a dialogue about city, human, and memory.
The project originates from my personal experience in Shanghai, a city where urban transformation constantly reshapes both the physical environment and individual memory. As familiar buildings vanished and neighborhoods were replaced, I witnessed how personal histories and collective traces were gradually erased in the process of modernization. This experience became the emotional and conceptual foundation of the work.
Drawing upon the language of relational aesthetics, City Skin: Placing Traces invites participation rather than passive observation. The work becomes a living surface where viewers leave their own ephemeral marks, activating a collective process of remembering and erasure. This embodied interaction resists the homogenizing tendencies of urban renewal — those that flatten individuality, history, and the intimate “temperature” of human presence — by reintroducing sensorial, emotional, and temporal complexity into the photographic experience.
The project proposes that photographic images can breathe, shift, and respond to audiences’ interactive. Within this field of transformation, City Skin: Placing Traces reclaims warmth and impermanence as acts of quiet resistance, preserving the tenderness and unpredictability that urban standardization seeks to erase.
Yutong Chen, 2025. City Skin:Placing Traces, Photographs, temperature-sensitive ink, Inkjet print onrag paper, 33 prints on the wall, up to 52 prints on the desk.
Vedio: City Skin — Placing Traces