Blossoms Shanghai (春) is an artist photo book constructed as a personal travel guide to Shanghai, viewed through the lens of memory, longing, and cinematic nostalgia. Inspired by Wong Kar-wai’s television series of the same name (Blossoms Shanghai) and created during the Chinese New Year period while living abroad, the work reflects my emotional attempt to reconnect with the city I call home. Rather than documenting Shanghai objectively, the project presents the city as I emotionally remember and experience it — fragmented, romanticised, crowded, luminous, and constantly slipping between past and present.

The book moves through hotels, restaurants, corridors, dining tables, river views, and streetscapes that carry traces of both old Shanghai elegance and rapid contemporary transformation. Through saturated colour, dim lighting, reflective surfaces, and stylised typography, the images echo the visual language of Wong Kar-wai: spaces become emotionally charged rather than purely documentary. The city is portrayed not as a fixed geography, but as an atmosphere shaped by migration, memory, and desire.

Text fragments throughout the work function as intimate annotations, combining observations, family memories, urban folklore, and personal reflections. These writings mimic the format of a travel handbook while simultaneously resisting its authority. Instead of offering practical directions, the book guides the viewer through emotional coordinates — where to witness reunion dinners, where prosperity feels fragile, where sweetness lingers, and where nostalgia quietly accumulates within everyday rituals.

Created from the perspective of someone temporarily separated from home, Blossoms Shanghai explores the tension between cultural intimacy and distance. The project reflects on how cities continue to exist within the imagination after departure, becoming reconstructed through longing and selective remembrance. Influenced by the melancholic temporality found in Blossoms Shanghai, the work embraces impermanence: restaurants may disappear, skylines may transform, prosperity may fade, yet certain gestures, flavours, and atmospheres remain suspended within personal memory.

Ultimately, the book becomes both a love letter and a temporary archive — an attempt to preserve fleeting encounters with Shanghai before they dissolve into nostalgia.