Reconstructing my hometown’s memories

As tunnel boring machines tear through my hometown's old streets, the city's skin is peeled away layer by layer. Brick patterns, floral grilles, street life—once dismissed as "backward"—are buried under asphalt and glass. This bench is a body I have woven for the city's forgotten corners.
Its skeleton is hewn from dismantled old wood, cloaked in discarded carpet and gel wax. Guangdong's floral window tracery is pressed into its surface, letting faded patterns breathe within translucent wax—like city fingerprints sealed in time. The bench legs are tangles of metal spikes and wax thread, where industrial rigidity softens into wool: industrialization's incursion into the countryside, and memory gently wrapping trauma.