There is a quiet persistence running through Jonathan Lei’s photographs. His subjects are rarely dramatic, from an old family home and chair left inside an abandoned building, to a shadow crossing a pavement. These places and objects carry little spectacle, yet Lei draws something compelling out of them. His photographs ask what can be understood from things that remain after their original purpose has started to disappear.
Born in Guangdong in 2001 and now based in Liverpool, Lei works between the UK and China. His practice has developed through questions of memory, identity, and the forces that shape everyday life. Increasingly, his photographs consider how individuals live within structures they did not create, such as family histories, social expectations, political systems, architecture, and the environment.
In his The Paradox of Forgetting (2025–ongoing), Lei returns with his parents to his mother’s childhood home during the Zhongyuan Festival, a time traditionally associated with remembering the dead. The house has become overgrown and its belongings are covered with dust. His mother puts on clothes left by her grandmother and recalls the routines of a life that existed decades earlier. The photographs record this act of remembrance, but the project is also concerned with the limits of memory. The house has survived, yet much of what gave it meaning has gone.
Lei explores this tension further in Soft Shelter (2025), where photographs of his mother’s childhood environment are UV-printed onto stone. The stone gives the images a sense of physical permanence, but what is preserved is only a photographic record of a place that has already changed. The work therefore brings together two different forms of time, the durability of the stone and the irreversible changes represented in the photograph. Rather than restoring the past, the work preserves a trace of it, suggesting that memory can survive while the original experience and environment cannot be recovered in their former state.
This concern becomes more social in The Position of Ideals (2026–ongoing). The project begins with his father, whose artistic training took place during the final decades of China’s centrally planned economic system. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the state played a dominant role in organising production and employment, and individual career choices were often shaped by the need for stable, state-supported work. China began its economic reforms in 1978, gradually introducing greater market forces and reducing direct state control. Lei’s father entered a stable profession during this period of transition, as the possibilities of pursuing an artistic career were increasingly weighed against the security of conventional employment. Lei interrogates how these wider economic and social conditions can shape personal ambitions, sometimes causing people to adapt their aspirations without any single moment in which that choice is explicitly made.
This idea of adaptation continues in Windward (2026–ongoing), photographed in Yangjiang, a coastal city frequently hit by typhoons. Lei grew up with these storms and returns to find a landscape accustomed to repairing itself. Buildings are reinforced, damaged spaces are rebuilt, and some structures are slowly abandoned. The photographs observe a community living with conditions it cannot fully control. Adaptation here becomes an ordinary part of existence, visible in the ways people modify, repair and eventually abandon the spaces around them.
His recent works in the UK bring the same attentiveness to familiar spaces. Shadow Thames (2026), which won the runner-up position at Thames Lens, began with a passing figure briefly interrupting sunlight along the Thames in London. The resulting shadow becomes the subject. In Awaiting (2026), a single chair remains inside an abandoned public building. There is no person present, yet the chair suggests that someone once occupied the space and that the possibility of occupation has not entirely disappeared.
Lei’s photography depends on this kind of attention. He does not need to make an event appear larger than it is. Instead, he allows small signs of change to accumulate, like dust, damaged walls, empty rooms, shadows, weather, and objects left behind.
Across his work, disappearance is rarely presented as a single event. It happens gradually, through neglect, adaptation, ageing, and the passing of time. Photography becomes a way of staying with that process. Lei photographs what is still there, knowing that its meaning may continue to change after the photograph has been made.
