溪流干涸，人群经过；
瞧，高耸处已无云。
——摩天楼
这些照片记录了2020至2022的上海，这座城市与2489万居民的休克时期（2019年人口普查数据）。经历隔离、混乱、复苏，人们离开又到来，在绵长与无常的生活中不断校准集体记忆。
曾经灯火通明的大楼不再像平日一样发光；电梯停运，电子屏滚动着中英文的“暂停”；人们隐入室内，植物与动物重新占领城市；亚洲首富新竣工的地产项目上空，烂尾楼爆破的粉尘弥漫中环；历史与现实在租界上空飞翔盘旋，在地铁站的出入口不见踪影；坠落的躯体与身处旋涡的声音隔空对话；十六铺码头的壮丁冒着汗珠，他们的后代，试图在这座城市蔓延四溢的空调冷气中翩翩起舞。
事物的本质常常在意外中显现。当城市动能短暂接近零度，前所未有的停滞，让当代生活的许多特征和逻辑更为暴露。
2022，周平浪
Behold the streams run dry,
Behold the crowds process through;
Behold the blood flows down -
Alas, the day the clouds fade out.
—HIGH-RIS_
The railway, having served as the definitive symbol of urban modernization since the 1920s, yielded its primacy to the elevator-driven vertical revolution of the 20th century skyscraper. Yet beneath the veneer of packed brasseries and commuter-clogged subway systems, it is the digital lattice - not physical transit - that now forges the denser connective tissue of contemporary urban mobility.
These images, captured between 2020 and Shanghai's prolonged containment period in 2022, document the city's suspended animation. Streetscapes once throbbing with 24.89 million inhabitants (2019 municipal census data) dissolved into eerie theatre sets, their skeletal presence belying the invisible mass of humanity in self-imposed sequestration. The subsequent recovery phase birthed a post-lockdown renaissance: derelict storefronts morphed into neo-speakeasies steeped in carpe diem ethos, their neon-lit interiors pulsating with compensatory hedonism.
Many characteristics of this mega city are more clearly exposed during the virulent epoch. Meanwhile, the logic of the metropolis changes as the structure of itself. Capital flows - those de facto power vectors - continue their territorial expansion, midwifing a new order beneath the Techno-Leviathan's gaze. This Möbius strip of urban evolution manifests most acutely along the Huangpu River corridor, where blockchain-enabled art galleries now root themselves in the riverfront.
The paradox of perpetual transformation crystallized when the city's kinetic energy briefly approached absolute zero. Yet even in that unprecedented stasis, essential rhythms endured - the nocturnal ballet of delivery boys supplanting human circulation, the ceaseless data streams through fibre-optic arteries. What emerges through the societal aperture is not mere recovery, but a profound recalibration: embedded within the chaos lie discernible patterns of collective consciousness, etching themselves into the city's structural memory as permanent monuments to our virulent epoch.
—2022 Zhou Pinglang
