During a two-month residency in Bangkok, I lived and worked in one of the oldest Chinese districts in the world. Each day, I walked through the same streets, lined with shop-houses run by Chinese families, where spaces of work, life, and public display blend seamlessly without interruption. These microcosms, visible from the street, reveal a complete porosity between the intimate and the collective, between human presence and merchandise. They form a true daily theatre, in which the inhabitants are the unwitting actors and passers-by the spectators.

This immersion triggered a reflection on the carefully orchestrated preservation of a bygone cultural authenticity, often perpetuated to fuel a tourism economy eager for exoticism. While Bangkok embodies all the dynamics of a contemporary megacity, this district appears frozen in a ritualised past. Living conditions are precarious, buildings are dilapidated, and yet the perpetuation of this setting captivates a Western audience seeking the picturesque. This tension between attraction and sacrifice, authenticity and artificiality, individual freedom and identity confinement, forms the backbone of this series.

With the residents’ permission, I photographed these shopfronts frontally, without artifice, and composed collages juxtaposing three distinct shops to recreate the sensation of accumulation, fragmentation, and visual saturation I experienced while wandering. This method evokes the Western gaze which, in the haste of observation, merges these scenes into a single tableau.

Each triptych is framed with decorative borders inspired by traditional Chinese textiles, to symbolically enshrine these ordinary scenes and frame lives that are often invisible, confined within the interior of an expected representation.

This series offers a double reading: first, the wonder before a vibrant, colourful, and “authentic” universe; then, the awareness of idleness, identity ambivalence, and social confinement experienced by the heirs of a migrant culture. It questions the responsibility of the gaze — and of tourism — in the artificial maintenance of a folklore whose social realities remain all too real.