Yutong Chen

City Skin

February 6th – 28th, 2026

City Skin: Placing Traces is a photographic installation that explores the fragile relationship between urban transformation, human presence, and memory. Through black-and-white photographs overlaid with a heat-responsive surface, the work transforms viewing into a tactile encounter, where images are activated through touch and temporarily altered by the warmth of the body.

The project emerges from the artist’s lived experience of Shanghai—a city shaped by accelerated urbanization, where familiar architectures and neighborhoods are continually erased and rebuilt. As physical environments shift, personal histories and collective memories are often displaced or rendered invisible. This condition of loss and overwriting forms the conceptual foundation of the work.

Informed by relational aesthetics and expanded photographic practice, City Skin: Placing Traces resists passive spectatorship. Viewers are invited to engage directly with the surface of the image, revealing concealed details while simultaneously leaving new, ephemeral marks. These interactions mirror the processes through which cities accumulate, erase, and rewrite traces of human life over time.

The work proposes photography not as a fixed record, but as a responsive and evolving surface. Against the homogenizing forces of urban renewal, City Skin: Placing Traces preserves moments of warmth and instability as silent acts of resistance, allowing photographic images and city spaces to remain unfinished, contingent, and active.