I was working on a project and spent a few months in Shanghai. At the same time, I decided to work on a very personal project. I wanted to portray the city of Shanghai, but instead of photographing the over- photographed Skyline with its skyscrapers and the river, I decided to photograph normal people doing normal things - people in so-called everyday, unspectacular situations (if such a thing even exists).
I was fascinated by the amount of intimacy that one is constantly confronted with in this city of almost 30 million people. I was excited by this kind of body culture that avoids the body of others or interacts with them, and mostly does so with a certain elegance, that eludes any choreography of behavior. Bodies leaning towards each other, or those that have been thrown together by chance; people who communicate for a moment non-verbally, but physically, without being aware of each other; strange, often purely geometric constellations that seem modern and archaic at the same time. As if the history, the architecture and the tension-charged atmosphere of the city were entering into each and every body of its inhabitants.