2023

Street vendors in China, especially women, exist on the margins of both the informal economy and society itself. Through long-term on-site research and conversations, I have come to understand that their work is no easier than corporate labor—in fact, it is fraught with even greater instability. Every day, they navigate uncertainty, constantly shifting locations, and facing the looming threat of eviction by urban management. Their decision to become vendors is often not a choice but a necessity, shaped by life’s constraints—caring for children, limited educational opportunities, and the barriers to securing formal employment. The allure of flexible hours and low entry costs comes at the price of relentless precarity.

Within these invisible constraints, I began to ask: What do they truly desire? What dreams lie beneath their daily routines? Yet, for many, these questions felt distant—cruel, even. The repetition of monotonous days in the crowded marketplace had dulled their ability to imagine beyond survival. Over time, habit replaces ambition, and the extraordinary becomes an impossibility.

However, in rare moments, when I invited them to picture their dreams, I saw something shift. A flicker of joy, a genuine smile—an assertion of personal existence beyond the roles imposed upon them. In these fleeting expressions, I recognized the same themes that drive my work: the complexities of female identity, the tension between constraint and desire, the negotiation of selfhood within societal structures. Their stories, like the thresholds I often explore in my paintings, embody a liminal space—trapped between necessity and aspiration, endurance and longing. In capturing these moments, I seek to reclaim not only their narratives but also the profound yet fragile agency embedded within them.

he eight women featured in this project are all street vendors from the areas surrounding Supo Market in Chengdu, China, each with more than five years of experience navigating the uncertainties of this trade. Behind their daily routines of bargaining and selling, they once aspired to be soldiers, teachers, doctors, travelers, business owners—or simply to have a job where they could wear clean clothes to work every day.

This project captures their unspoken dreams, painting their faces as a testament to their existence beyond the marketplace. These portraits were displayed on the market walls, momentarily disrupting the monotony of daily life. In a space where people often pass by in haste, the works invite passersby to pause, to observe, and to acknowledge the women not just as vendors, but as individuals with desires, histories, and aspirations of their own.

In the end, I would like to thank the IAG members and all of  my friends who helped me in this project.