This project takes a group of anonymous CGI figures on a journey through successive states of representation, materiality and place. Originally extracted from promotional hoardings surrounding an artificial island development called Shuangyu Island (双鱼岛)  in Zhangzhou Development Zone (Zhangzhou, Fujian, China), the figures existed only as supporting actors within visualisations of a speculative future real estate development. Separated from their architectural backdrop and enlarged to life size as cardboard cut-outs, they were transformed from incidental details into autonomous subjects; a consideration of the overlooked human infrastructure through which visions of prosperity are made believable.

The figures were subsequently returned to the island from which they were supposed to inhabit, and photographed within the landscapes they had been designed to inhabit. Yet the future awaiting them had shifted. Rather than luxury hotels, waterfront restaurants and cosmopolitan leisure, they encountered vacant plots alongside the more modest attractions that had emerged in their place: a glamping site, a petting zoo and a children's play park. Occupying this temporal dislocation, the figures hover between promise and aftermath, neither belonging entirely to the speculative image nor to the reality that followed. Through their displacement and return, the work asks what becomes of the imagined inhabitants of futures that never fully arrive, and how the visual languages of development continue to linger long after the futures they projected have begun to unravel.