Inside Shanghai 屋裡廂
- PublicationInside Shanghai 屋裡廂 is a design project that explores the intimate spaces, layered histories, and evolving identities of Shanghai through a deeply personal lens. As someone born and raised in this city, I have always been surrounded by its contradictions—modern skyscrapers rising beside crumbling alleyways, global influences interwoven with local traditions. This project is both an act of preservation and reinterpretation. It draws on old family photographs taken by my maternal grandparents, oral histories I collected through interviews with relatives, and extensive research into the city’s architectural and cultural shifts.
The title 屋裡廂 is a Shanghainese term referring to the inner rooms of traditional homes—spaces that are private, lived-in, and filled with memory. By choosing this term, I aim to center the project on the emotional core of domestic life, as opposed to public narratives of urban development. The book becomes a vessel of visual storytelling: combining documentary photography, hand-drawn diagrams, fragments of personal stories, and contextual essays. Through these pages, I investigate how domestic spaces—especially those in lilong (lane-style) housing—have witnessed transformations in family structures, gender roles, and everyday life.
Rather than presenting Shanghai as a monolithic metropolis, Inside Shanghai 屋裡廂 attempts to capture its micro-histories. The project resists nostalgia, instead treating memory as an active, interpretive process. Old photos are not just archival images—they are reactivated through annotations, juxtaposition, and design decisions that encourage readers to engage critically with the past.
This book is not only a tribute to my grandparents’ lives and the spaces they inhabited, but also a broader reflection on how personal archives can intersect with collective memory. It invites readers—especially younger generations of Shanghainese or those curious about urban heritage—to consider how the texture of everyday life holds cultural meaning. In doing so, Inside Shanghai 屋裡廂 asks: what does it mean to belong to a place in flux? And how can design help us remember, question, and reimagine the cities we call home?
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