From the series Factory Drifter.
A quiet corner of the glass factory where things are constantly being made and stacked. I remember it more as an atmosphere than an event — light, dust, and repetition.
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The project Factory Drifter begins with a question: what does it mean to grow up in a glass factory?
From birth until middle school, I lived inside this environment. The constant hum of machinery formed the background of everyday life, along with floors that could never be walked on carelessly in slippers, where tiny shards of glass might cut into the skin at any moment. Yet for me, glass once felt dreamlike—like a soft childhood membrane wrapping everything around me in freedom and ease. I grew up closely surrounded by my family, and even broken glass seemed to shimmer with a strange kind of light.
As I grew older and returned to the factory, I began to see another reality: repetitive labour, oppressive heat, low-margin export production, and the cold, rigid rhythm of industrial operation. My childhood memory and the industrial reality had always been intertwined, but the tension between them had become increasingly difficult to ignore.
A child raised in this environment benefits from it in ways that are only understood later: through the factory, I accessed education, mobility, and eventually the possibility of viewing the factory itself as a subject of photography. Yet this distance also marks a form of disconnection—I no longer fully belong to this place. The ability to return and photograph the factory is itself enabled by the distance I have gained from it.
This project follows a “drifter” shaped by industrial conditions—someone whose body carries an enduring, strangely warm memory of childhood while gradually drifting away from the space that formed it.
The work is photographed using a Fujifilm GX680 medium-format camera on 120 film. Using the camera’s tilt-and-shift movements, I revisit the glass factory from a subtly displaced and ambiguous position. Photography functions both as a form of return and as a questioning of the position from which I now see. Beneath a tender and personal gaze, the work traces the unresolved tensions between childhood memory, family labour, class mobility, and estrangement.
