Photo Journal Monday: Lingfei Ren

2D, 4D, 6D, 7D, from series Rooms, 2020 © Lingfei Ren

Images and text by Lingfei Ren

Rooms

Rooms consists of photo sculptures — multi-layered sheets of acrylic with photographic collages on them — that depict rooms in residential rental buildings in New York City. The project investigates the economics and architectures of rental apartment, and reflects upon the housing dilemmas of recent transplants to the metropolis: the nomadic lifestyle with frequent relocations and temporality of “home.” Confined within a room as their only private space, residents utilize every square inch to bring out the most functionality, identity, and diversity.

6F, 7F, 8F, from series Rooms, 2020 © Lingfei Ren

Each photo collage sculpture consists of 15 to 20 layers of plastic with multiple photographic elements depicting domestic items. Together the layers in one collage represent a singular room but it is one that is furnished with objects from multiple identically shaped rooms that are stacked up vertically in the same apartment building.

3, 4, 6, 7, 11, from series Rooms, 2020 © Lingfei Ren

My process is that I visit a rental building and ask permission from residents — who live in those identical units that located one above each other — to take photos of their identically scaled rooms. Later, I take out objects from each image of the rooms and print them on multiple Plexiglasses. Then I stack those layers one behind another to create a new room, a compressed space in which illusive depth and real depth exist at the same time. The series offers a compressed view of urban domesticity, caught between the generic and the personal.

5A, 7A, 11A, from series Rooms, 2020 © Lingfei Ren

Work From Home

I asked friends to send me pictures of their workspaces at home, then I composed them into one room. Because of the pandemic, most of us started working from home. Some people find working from home more comfortable while the others find it less engaging; nonetheless, the concept of home is changing.

Work From Home, 2020 © Lingfei Ren