A contemplative visual journey through Chongqing’s transforming riverfront, Ximeng Tu’s series reveals a city negotiating memory, infrastructure and the quiet persistence of everyday life.
Ximeng Tu’s images of contemporary Chongqing move with the unhurried gravity of a city learning to inhabit its own contradictions. Shot along the banks of the Jialing and beneath the tensile webs of new bridges, the series shifts between the monumental and the intimate—elevated highways draped in creeping foliage, anonymous towers dissolving into haze, boys standing in the shadow of an abandoned boat. Tu’s camera doesn’t chase spectacle; instead, it dwells in the interstices where change accumulates almost imperceptibly, like sediment along a river’s edge.
The built environment asserts itself with a kind of ambivalent authority. Cantilevered balconies sag under the weight of improvised gardens, their concrete husks facing a river now bordered by crisp infrastructural ambitions. In other scenes, the underbellies of expressways have developed into accidental gardens, where vines climb the pillars as if attempting to reclaim what was ceded to progress. These juxtapositions are never didactic. They read more like field notes from a city simultaneously expanding and unraveling, a place where nature is not lost but forced into unexpected negotiations with urban logic.
People appear as quiet anchors in this shifting terrain. A lone figure stands on a stone embankment, dwarfed by the sweep of a cable-stayed bridge; dancers practice in a riverside plaza; workers lean against the railing beneath an overpass adorned with wire-like calligraphic forms. These gestures—modest, rhythmic, ephemeral—counterbalance the overwhelming scale of their surroundings. Tu seems less interested in documenting individuals as subjects than in tracing how they inscribe themselves, however lightly, onto a city in perpetual motion.
What emerges is a portrait of Chongqing that resists the celebratory narratives of modernization. Environmental haze blurs the horizon; riverbanks reveal signs of strain; the presence of poverty is neither aestheticized nor hidden. Yet Tu’s gaze is empathetic. His return to his hometown is framed as a personal excavation, a way of confronting not only the city’s transformations but the erosion of his own memories. In pursuing the desire to “freeze Chongqing in time,” he accepts the impossibility of the task. The river’s flow—literal and metaphorical—remains the quiet antagonist.
Through this tension, Tu’s project becomes less a documentation of loss than an articulation of belonging. These photographs register a city that is both familiar and estranged, a living organism that shapes and is shaped by the people who move through it. In lingering over its textures—the concrete, the mist, the river water, the daily gestures of its inhabitants—Tu offers a meditation on how one reconciles with a place that refuses to stay still.
