Salt Ponds

In Salt Ponds, Ke Peng photographs the rapidly transforming urban landscapes of contemporary China through a language of repetition, distance, and subtle disorientation. Made over the course of five years across multiple cities, the images resist the spectacle often associated with Chinese urbanization, instead focusing on anonymous architectures, transitional spaces, and fragile moments embedded within everyday life.

Although traces of human presence appear throughout, the photographs remain deliberately difficult to locate. Cities begin to resemble one another, shaped by standardized development, mass housing, highways, and carefully controlled environments. Within these seemingly interchangeable landscapes, Peng isolates moments of color, texture, and visual rhythm that interrupt the uniformity of the built environment.

The project unfolds as a meditation on life within accelerated modernization, observing how people navigate cities that offer both possibility and alienation. Rather than documenting specific places, Salt Ponds constructs a collective psychological landscape shaped by migration, urban expansion, and emotional displacement.

Published by Jiazazhi Press
2018 (second edition 2021)
China
Softcover
21.5 × 28.2 cm
152 pages