In 2019, photographer ZWEI returned to Shanghai after finishing his studies abroad. Around the same time, his former teacher, Japanese photographer Kobayashi Kisei, visited the city for a photography trip. Acting as both translator and local guide, ZWEI spent days walking and shooting around Shanghai with him — an experience that reshaped how he looked at the city he had grown up in.

The experience eventually led him back to a subject he had started photographing in middle school: Shanghai's disappearing lilongs and old neighborhoods.

At the time, he was already working on a photo series about Shanghai's ferry terminals, inspired by years spent living near the Taitongzhan Ferry Terminal. After finishing the trip with Kobayashi, he decided to expand the project into a larger long-term documentation of neighborhoods undergoing demolition and redevelopment, naming the series "Shanghainese Road".

The project began again at the Fair Road Ferry Terminal in what is now the North Bund, after realizing the area around Taitongzhan had already quietly transformed beyond recognition.

Presented as side-by-side comparisons of past and present, the series reflects both Shanghai's rapid urban transformation and the increasingly rare practice of long-term documentary photography. While photography has become more accessible than ever in the digital era, sustained and systematic documentation of ordinary people and disappearing neighborhoods remains uncommon, largely because of the amount of time, labor, and money it requires.

ZWEI shares ongoing updates from the "Shanghai Road" project on Xiaohongshu and Douyin(ID: tsujikagami), where additional images and field notes from his long-term documentation of Shanghai's changing streets can be found, as well as on Instagram (ID: @tsujikagamihana).