- Without designated scenic viewpoints, how should landscapes exist in their raw or functional growth? Through the devotion to visible lines, fragmented images are formed—an incompleteness that has become acceptable in modern life, yet one we continually avoid in our curated digital representations of landscapes.


Curtains (2025) is a photographic dérive through the overlooked suburban spaces that resist scenic designation. These are landscapes without intent—raw, functionally grown, and shaped by infrastructure rather than aesthetics. Each image is marked by visual interruptions: power lines, barriers, tangled vegetation, and unseen thresholds that mediate the act of seeing.

The project responds to the spatial psychology of obscured vision, where the camera’s desire to “capture landscape” is repeatedly blocked. Visual fragments become compositional rhythms—each obstruction forming a kind of visual syllable. The title Curtains evokes not only the material veils that interrupt sight, but also the metaphoric space between the known and the unreachable, the seen and the imagined.

Structured loosely as a photographic fugue, the series introduces a theme of blocked perception that is revisited and refracted across multiple spatial registers. Rather than offering a resolved visual experience, Curtains insists on the instability of landscape when seen outside of spectacle. It invites a return to incomplete, broken, and non-symbolic ways of seeing—where interruption becomes a rhythm of perception.
©JIAJIE ZHENG