shashasha

“The abandoned building is not an isolated spectacle but an unrevealed corner of the city. Tearing down a building does not only mean demolition in the material sense but also means that all the people and things attached to and occuring in these old buildings would be submerged along with this process.”
― from Zhu Baolei’s afterword

Zhu Baolei visits, explores and photographs abandoned buildings in the city of Nanning in southern China. Embedded in the urban landscape, these buildings have lost their use due to continuous expansion and development. Though deserted, Zhu Baolei found not only traces of human life in these apartments, but also objects and artifacts that passively tell the story of families, generations, and the city itself. “Live in the South Wind” opens the doors to a hidden realm of personal histories and traces through images of the abandoned buildings and apartments as well as photographs found and developed by Zhu Baolei.

“Instead of a single cityscape of nostalgia, what is presented in this book are various perceptible elements authentically rendered by Zhu Baolei through images, such as the variation of urban abandoned buildings, the interaction between people and architectural spaces, the development of the order in residential buildings and the changing of daily life.”
― from the publisher’s description