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Shanghai in motion as seen through eyes of a lensman
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ON a steamy August night in Shanghai, the Liu Haisu Art Museum darkened and flashed black-and-white images of a city. The city that emerged was both familiar and distant: flooded streets where commuters rolled up their pants, neon lights streaming into the air, and shikumen (stone-gated) alleyways with smoke and noise.
Since the early 1990s, photographer Xu Haifeng has been in Shanghai, documenting the city in upheaval.
Xu’s works have become part of the city’s common memory. For three decades, he has carried his camera through rain and pollution, demolition sites and neon-lit boulevards, capturing lives that are rarely documented in official records. His austere and poignant photos capture a Shanghai on the verge of reinvention — where skyscrapers grew, trolleybuses went, but subways expanded, and ancient neighborhoods gave way to new districts.
“Sometimes it was just a feeling,” he said. “You stand on a corner, and suddenly everything — the light, the faces, even the cluttered wires above — lines up. You press the shutter before it vanishes.”
Shanghai-born Xu worked at the Municipal Engineering Research Institute, where he documented construction sites before transitioning to photojournalism.
He recently published a book titled “Shanghai Expressions at the Turn of the Century.” The current exhibition at the Liu Haisu Art Museum aligns with this release, presenting his photographs as both a personal archive and a representation of collective memory.
In the afternoon heat, the photographer would wait under plane trees for the light to break across an asphalt road in the shape of coins.
“Those moments felt like Shanghai stepping into a brand-new age. There was a fever in that air,” Xu recalled.
His work captured that fever — the exhilaration of change and the anxiety of people caught between the past and an uncertain future.
Then the images appeared: children teetering carelessly on a train carriage at the old Shanghai Railway Station, a woman striding past neon signs with quiet defiance on Nanjing Road E., and the Oriental Pearl TV Tower just rising over Lujiazui in 1994. Every frame seemed to encapsulate Shanghai’s fleeting moments.
One photo shows Huaihai Road swamped after a summer storm, with people walking barefoot through murky water and buses stalled, highlighting the city’s century-old drainage system.
“It was a typical sight decades ago,” Xu explained. “The century-old drainage system could never keep up. Every year, the city would flood.”
His camera sought drama and realism, leaving behind an unadorned record of daily survival — a reminder of how far the city has progressed, with modernized infrastructure making such moments rare.
His lens also focused on 1950s and 1960s workers’ housing complexes like the Caoyang neighborhood in Putuo District, whose stark facades were softened by pots simmering in community kitchens and children running through stairwells.
“Neighborhoods like these were a kind of social contract in brick and mortar,” said city cultural researcher Dong Xiongfei. “They were built to bind labor and community in the new China, and in many ways, the daily life in shops, alleys and housing blocks reveals as much about Shanghai as its skyline.”
Dong has long reflected on how Xu’s images capture the city’s deeper shifts.
In the 1990s, shikumen alleys were still dense with families hanging laundry across courtyards, while workers’ housing blocks bustled with shared kitchens and children chasing through stairwells. Corner shops sold cigarettes, soy sauce and cheap beer to neighbors who relied on trust more than receipts.
“A photograph may look like a fleeting street scene,” Dong said, “but behind it are questions of memory, belonging and the fragile social contracts that held the city together.”
However, Xu denied staging his photos. He trusted “luck” and “the instant.” Xu photographed a young woman along the curb of Huating Road, a bustling garment market with sellers and traffic. Her expression alternated between doubt and resolution. The photograph became one of Xu’s most recognized works.
“At an exhibition years later,” he recalled, “a visitor told me she had been her classmate and had gone abroad.”
Looking back, Xu admitted that when he first picked up his camera, he was just naïve, even happy, when he pressed the shutter. None of his portraits were staged — “every face was pure luck,” he said, yet over time that luck became something larger.
“Photography is about bearing witness,” he noted.
What Xu shot out of curiosity or instinct is now hardened testimony. He felt joy, worry and embarrassment with each click. But when the images reappear today, they are no longer private artifacts. They are now part of Shanghai’s public archive, reflecting millions who lived through its rebirth.
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