1 1/2 house




With the rapid expansion of the city happened in china in the 21st century, huge amount of traditional houses have been demolished in recent years to build new apartments. However during this process there will be a long period which old houses had been demolished but new buildings still remain to be built. There occur many ruins in the city

I decide to utilize this particular phenomenon to make new project. I started to observe one famous demolished area called #54 in the center of shanghai in 2012 and recorded the site changing as well as local people’s life style in this area during 2012-2014.




I found workers will accumulated the materials (like doors, windows, timbers) dismantled from the old buildings together in the site.



So I recycled these materials, reconstructed these materials to make space-scale furniture, then I sent these furniture back to the site and constructed them in front of an old building which hadn’t been dismantled there.




Finally I made a surrealism installation which I called 1 1/2 house in the #54 site. Through this installation I had converted the public infrastructure like street light into the table lamp, and converted the exterior wall to semi-interior wall, blurred the traditional boundary between public and private space. I had made a close relationship between the behavior on the installation and the behavior of the local people inside the building.