Kai Sieber

Corona City

At the end of January 2020, after a stay in Shanghai, I was sitting in the airport there and was confronted with the obligation to wear a mask, tests, and the oppressive foreboding of the pandemic for the first time.

Three months later I started an abstract painting. I spontaneously associated the white spot in the middle of the picture with “expansion” and within one night a deserted street of melancholic beauty was created in a cold light. In my mind, I was back in Shanghai, although I could not have imagined this bustling city being deserted until my picture was taken.

In January of this year, I populated the city digitally – with motifs that I had photographed during my visits to the site. The animation is a perpetual depopulation, population – in waves as we know them from the pandemic.