M Goi Jau Lok

M Goi Jau Lok originated in a Shenzhen Art Museum commission on images of the city. Faced with the scale of “Shenzhen” as a subject, Bai did not attempt to construct a complete urban portrait. Instead, he returned to a minibus route he frequently travelled as a child and revisited locations along the way through photography, moving image, and field recording. The title comes from the Cantonese phrase used to request a stop on a minibus, echoing the repeated actions of stopping, returning, and looking again.

Years later, roads, shopping areas, amusement spaces, signs, and public facilities had been replaced, covered, or renamed. Bai followed the familiar route in search of points that could still be recognised bodily, allowing personal memory to determine where he paused, photographed, and listened. Urban change therefore acquired the scale of lived experience rather than remaining an abstract story of development.

The photographs were layered with text, illustration, colour, and graphic fragments that retain traces of advertisements, tickets, street printing, and old television images. Field recordings enter parts of the moving-image work. Lightboxes and screens hang at different heights in a darkened space, so visitors encounter the material gradually through obstruction, gaps, and partial views.

The work does not attempt to restore a route that has disappeared. It functions instead as a form of fieldwork organised by private memory, asking what sounds, images, and bodily habits can still return a person to places that have been repeatedly transformed.