2023

Women Street Vendors: Dreams in Precarity

This project focuses on women working within informal economies, examining how long-term precarity reshapes their sense of self, desire, and imagination of the future. Through extended on-site research and conversations with female street vendors in Chengdu, China, I observed how survival gradually replaces aspiration, and how daily repetition erodes the possibility of imagining life beyond necessity.

Rather than documenting labour conditions alone, the project centres on moments when these women were invited to articulate their dreams—often for the first time in years. These brief expressions of joy, hesitation, or disbelief reveal a fragile yet persistent agency, suspended between endurance and longing.

By painting their portraits and installing them directly within the marketplace, the work intervenes in everyday urban space, momentarily disrupting routines of invisibility. This project reflects a recurring concern in my practice: the female body as a site where social structures, desire, and personal identity intersect—particularly within spaces that exist between public visibility and social marginalisation.

In the end, I would like to thank the IAG members and all of  my friends who helped me in this project —2023, Chengdu, China / Public Art Project