Limbo Project — jiajiezheng

JIAJIE ZHENG

Series The Approach That Never Arrives
Limbo
Visual Machine
Water Line

About

2024

Limbo is a photographic project that explores the notion of an in-between state within topographic photography. It focuses on areas shaped by large-scale land reclamation projects along the Hangzhou Bay, one of China’s most economically developed coastal regions—spaces that remain unfinished, yet are already inhabited and used in everyday life.

Visual Suspension

In these territories, urbanisation does not appear as a completed outcome, but persists as a prolonged condition in which beginnings and endings overlap. When development relies on the transformation of sea into land, the distinction between land and ocean becomes unstable, and with it, the relationship between people and their environment is continually reconfigured.

Rather than functioning as closed construction zones, these sites operate as open and evolving living environments. Construction workers labour on site; traditional fishing workers continue practices tied to the former coastline; visitors enter the tidal flats to collect what remains; and, once new towns are completed, new residents gradually move in. For the latter, this landscape is both new and unfamiliar: those who once lived here have already been displaced by the process of development.

Photography functions here as a mode of pause and observation, attending to forms of everyday life that have not yet been fully absorbed into dominant urban narratives. The distant sea and the nearby embankment remain aligned along a horizon that is perpetually out of reach, forming a spatial relationship held in continuous suspension.