A Place to Disappear

A Place to Disappear is a visual research-based project that explores man’s absence from the primitive landscape in the Earth. Imagining a near future, where the humans will disappear from this planet but comeback to Earth centuries later. The project focuses on the traces of utopian landscapes in transformation and extinction, and combines them with vernacular photographs from expeditions in the 19th century that documented the same locations. The physical, conceptual, and emotional junctions between these two groups of images serve to create a new narrative. Consequently, the sequence collapses space and time in a way that reflects the relationship between the archive and human memory. By capsizing the viewer’s expectations of a continuous story with a clear protagonist, the work’s open visual narrative also reveals the impossibility of a fixed landscape and taps into the viewers’ imaginations. The unfixed environmental fragments in this project are conspicuously absence of humans, alluding to man’s disappearance from the primate landscape and echoing a longing to return to the physical world akin to that of nineteenth-century Romantics. However, the limitless and expansive quality of the work proposes that the artist and viewer may create a new experiential universe together. Ultimately, A Place to Disappear suggests humans may transform their vanishing Earth into an open-ended Utopian macrocosm to which they may return.