Zen Foto Gallery is delighted to present The Scenery of Time, a solo exhibition by Chinese photographer Mo Yi. This marks Mo Yi’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition brings together 25 previously unseen black-and-white photographs from The Scenery of Time, a body of work created in 1995. These images were made after the artist was profoundly affected by the dense residential architecture he encountered following his move from Tibet to Tianjin in 1982. Shown here for the first time, the photographs are presented three decades after they were taken.

Prior to the mid-1990s, China faced an acute housing shortage. Newly married couples who wished to establish independent households were often compelled to remain with their parents, living together in severely confined conditions. Beginning in the 1980s, large-scale government-led urban development projects gradually reshaped cities in an effort to improve everyday living standards. By around 1995, nearly 80 percent of Tianjin’s residents who had previously lived in traditional single-story dwellings had relocated to collective apartment complexes.

Life in those older houses was marked by hardship: access to water was inconvenient, toilets were shared and located far from home, and long lines formed each morning. The new apartment buildings, though far from comfortable by today’s standards, represented a significant shift. Multiple households—often strangers to one another—shared kitchens, bathrooms, and living spaces, frequently without heating. While these conditions might seem austere now, at the time they signaled a profound transformation in urban living.

The housing estates Mo Yi photographed were composed of rows of identical buildings, their entrances and windows standardized and repetitive. Within this visual uniformity, however, he was drawn to the small details that resisted sameness. Children’s tricycles, honeycomb coal briquettes, oversized water jars, and other objects appear throughout the images—items already becoming obsolete, yet still retained. These remnants carried traces of personal histories, quietly embodying the passage of time and revealing social change through the ordinary landscape of daily life.

Years later, when I passed through those same neighborhoods, the buildings had vanished. Some sites had been redeveloped into financial centers, others into luxury housing or public parks. I sometimes wonder whether the residents carried those heavy water jars with them when they moved, or the honeycomb briquettes that once required two people to lift. In winter, people would stack the briquettes outside their doors, lay newspapers on the ground, and arrange cabbages and green onions on top. That scene, I believe, has disappeared completely.