Graduate Thesis, 2023

University of Toronto

Advisor: Jeannie Kim

Intermittently engulfed by thick fog and floating 32km off the coast of Shanghai, Yangshan Port is an artificial island dominated by autonomous machines. It resides within the Free Trade Zone, an urban periphery littered with warehouses and corporate campuses – in a never-ending pursuit for quantity and efficiency. This thesis questions the role and scale of humans in this large entangled logistical realm, where local and global trade violently collide. It taps into perspectival moments within the port and its locality - individual stories of isolation, persistence, propaganda, and transience - to locate the tiny human presence within a sea of machines.

Shop Prints

Part 1 looks at historic maritime trade and its importance in establishing the city’s amalgamated local and international identity. The early economy of trade in Shanghai sparked the subsequent explosion of trade, migration, architecture and infrastructure towards the global economic hub of a city we know today.

The studies witnessed the rapid urbanization rate of the past century - notably the industrial sprawl that quickly enveloped the historic city. This ever-growing contagion of Shanghai’s Free Trade Zone then becomes the basis of many near-future speculations around themes of workaholism, climate change, piracy, sleep deprivation and battles for land.

Part 2 explores the scalar mismatch between the isolated individuals who work on the port and the machinic landscape that they reside within. It acknowledges that although the port is 90% automated, that this island port is particularly alienating for the remainder 10% of active and passive demographics.

It seeks to emphasize snippets of the island’s past and stories of the individuals to relocate the human presences - moments of “friction” within the system. Accumulatively, the drawing captures 48 of these moments, presented in a booklet as short stories, to regain the identity of a place which has, so for long, been standardized.

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