I’m not sure why documenting the most mundane details of your life can turn into such a fascinating visual case study. It’s almost like taking “one man’s trash is another’s man’s treasure” one step too far - not even sifting through it but simply just stock-piling everything and photographing it. That’s exactly what Beijing-based artist Hong Hao has been doing for more than 15 years.

Well known as a conceptual photographer, he collects all the ephemera and trinkets (and sometimes just plain garbage) from his life and documents it. Then it’s just pleasurably voyeuristic and odd to look at it all think “this is someone’s life.” If you were to disappear today this would be the material left in your wake; the stuff you would dispose of says as much as the keepsakes you horde away. It all says everything…and it all says nothing.