Ziyu Wei/ Landscapes

Ziyu Wei is a visual artist and photographic creator based between London and Shanghai. Her practice centers on photography and cross-media experimentation, exploring themes such as personal identity, urban transformation, and cultural shifts in contemporary society. Drawing on her academic background in Sociology, Politics, and Performance & Interaction Design from University College London (UCL), her work often combines photography, moving image, and interactive installations, offering a critical perspective on the tensions between technological development, human experience, and rapidly changing urban landscapes.

‘’For me, landscapes are never mere backdrops. They breathe, they remember, and they carry histories as weighty as human lives. In Dunhuang, I saw camels tamed into tourist machines; the scars on their bodies speak a silent language, telling of endurance and coercion. Inside the grottoes, the colors of the murals have faded, yet they still whisper softly, reminding me that even sacred images cannot escape the erosion of time and human hands. In my father’s hometown, the landscape is intimate—fields, rivers, and crumbling walls interweave my childhood memories with the stories of my forebears. This project weaves these fragments together, asking: how do we truly perceive landscapes? Are they consumable vistas, heritage in urgent need of protection, or extensions of our own histories and wounds? Moving between deserts, murals, and hometowns, I seek a way to reconnect beauty with burden, memory with decay, and human care with destruction.’’