How to Reconstruct our Garden?







Ale Garden was a small independent music venue in Wujiaochang, Shanghai, near my university. For four years, my friends and I spent much of our time there: we rehearsed, watched films, talked for hours, took care of the space together. It was held up by people who kept showing up.

It didn't end in one clear blow. The site was slated for demolition, the space never made money, and one pressure after another kept building up. In the end, no one could carry it any further. After six years, it closed.

Having photographed Ale Garden for years, I began to wonder whether documentary photographs could do more than remember, whether they could take part in rebuilding. What I returned to was the difficulty of holding this place together. Keeping a space like this running meant facing endless small failures and conditions we could only negotiate with, never control.

So the reconstruction was bound to be rough. Before the demolition, my friends made a 3D scan of the venue, and I placed our old recordings back where those sounds once happened, letting them play again inside the collapsing model. Then we gave our photographs to AI and asked it to imagine what Ale Garden might look like if it could be rebuilt, a future we knew we would never reach. Its outputs were broken, strange, often wrong, and we kept feeding them back, round after round, telling it this isn't right, that doesn't match what we remember. The errors were what kept us talking. Into that imagined space I put our real photographs, so the moments that actually happened now rest somewhere that can never exist.

This reconstruction relives the wear of keeping a place like this alive. We have no clean place to begin from, and can only work within the conditions that already exist.

Ale Garden was never just a venue; it was where we grew, and now the garden is empty ground. It will not come back. We rebuild it even so, refusing to let it disappear in silence. That is all.

Thanks to Gu Jiayi for providing 3D scanning material, to Suanmogu, Li Yuanzhuo, Zhang Sihang, Lamu, Tiantian, and Zhang Hongyang for video and photographic archives, and to all the friends of Ale Garden who participated anonymously.