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Project 05

The Way We Played

Year
2024
Medium
Thirty archival pigment prints on aluminum composite panels (approximately 42–82 cm wide), 19-inch CRT television, video and sound
Installation rendering with thirty photographs dispersed across two gallery walls around a corner-mounted CRT television.

MT left Huizhou for Canada at ten. Returning in 2024 to make a project about childhood, he photographed children across the city's parks, schoolyards, shops, streets, and amusement spaces, encountering familiarity, nostalgia, and estrangement at once.

Man in glasses laughs while leaning toward a girl indoors, hands near her head.
Girl with glasses stands outdoors at dusk, wind blowing hair across her face.
Girl eats watermelon on a street beside a blue delivery scooter and a pole with smiley stickers.
Boy is held between two adults in a shop, reaching toward a woman's shirt.
Balloon seller seen from behind carrying clusters of colorful balloons with smiley faces.
Girl in a white dress walks through projected butterfly light on a dark floor.
Two children lie on a large glowing inflatable surface outdoors at dusk.
Boy with glasses holds a fishing net over steps by the water, framed by red ropes.
Adult crouches with an umbrella beside a seated boy on a lakeside walkway.
Boy leans on a blue rail eating a snack beside rocks and water at sunset.
Boy crouches by a lakeside curb, with an adult's legs at left and boats in the distance.
Boy holds red cloth below a Chinese school sign and a 2024 enrollment poster.
Four children stand with backs to the camera on a tiled plaza facing a distant adult.
Three children stand on a tiled plaza, one smiling toward the camera in a striped shirt.
Tall rocket-shaped amusement ride rises among dense green trees.
Small toys and figurines are arranged on a sidewalk beside a street with cars.
Blurred close-up of a child's face and torso, with hands holding small rectangular pieces.
Hands reach around a green mahjong table with an automatic tile machine in the center.
Plastic capsule toy machine filled with colorful balls, with Chinese text on the globe.
Child holds a toy rifle while an older boy in a red shirt stands close with a phone.
Boy poses with a toy gun in front of claw machines filled with plush toys.
Toy figures and carts are displayed on a market shelf under handwritten Chinese signs.
Colorful plastic fish and sea-creature toys float on blue water.
Close-up of a child's open hands holding yellow and red rectangular game pieces.
Empty bumper cars sit under a shaded amusement ride structure.
Boy smiles beside a yellow animal ride figure, pointing a small toy gun toward the camera.
Worn animal figures, including sharks and penguins, stand on an amusement ride platform.
Night scene of adults and children sitting on a bench, with one child blurred in foreground.
Blurred hand reaches toward small leaf pieces on dark pavement at night.
Two adults hold a smiling boy in a shop; one adult's hand holds a cigarette near his face.
I left Huizhou for Canada at the age of ten. In 2024, I returned to photograph childhood in the city where I had grown up. Watching children in parks, schoolyards, shops, streets, and amusement spaces brought familiarity, nostalgia, and estrangement together. Their lives sometimes recalled my own, while unfolding in a present that I could observe but never return to as a child.
A home video at the center of the work shows me at four years old, swinging a toy jingubang on a bed and absorbed in the role of Sun Wukong. It establishes the personal memory from which I approach the photographs around it. In those images, children hold toy guns, trade cigarette-pack cards, play mahjong, catch fish, throw rings toward rabbits in cages, and imitate the gestures of heroes and adults. Through play, the desire to grow up acquires objects, poses, rules, and roles. Fantasy and pleasure coexist with early encounters with authority, possession, control, and forms of violence whose meanings have yet to be fully understood.
The Way We Played places this childhood recording within the public life of present-day Huizhou. Photographs and video are dispersed across a shared visual field, allowing memory to move by association rather than chronology. Within this field, my remembered childhood enters into an active relation with the childhoods unfolding before me. Play becomes the passage through which children imagine adulthood, try on its gestures and roles, and begin to encounter its structures of desire, authority, possession, and power.