I have grown up in Shenzhen since I was a child, and to my perception, the city is changing rapidly. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the only mega-city in the world that was built in forty years. This rare speed of change has left its mark on the city's architectural style, with these stylised complexes preserving, like amber, the city's look from different eras. Influenced by the typological approach to photography pioneered by Mr and Mrs Becher, I decided to use this approach to record the different eras of architecture that belong to Shenzhen in a kind of archive.

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When I viewed the vast amount of material together, I could clearly recognise that the architectural styles of these different eras manifested the collective ideologies of the different periods, and that the development of these ideologies was exquisitely demonstrated in the changes in architectural styles.

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My portraits of these architectural ensembles, which range from the 1970s to the 2010s, serve as both a documentation of the history of the city's development as well as an artistic endeavour. The buildings themselves, in addition to their basic functionality, can be scrutinised as iconic symbols of their age and be explored for their deeper meanings.

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I have adopted a conservative, clear and objective approach to record the physical characteristics of these buildings, and through a meaningful arrangement, I have created new meanings and interpretations of these buildings, which are deeply connected to the rapidly changing collective consciousness, social consciousness and even national consciousness. They are no longer cold symbols; side by side they create an aesthetic rigour and slow progression.