Shanghai

Description

Ewan turns whole cities into gold. He works from maps, redrawing every street and building footprint in gold leaf until the result is two things: an exact record of a real place, and a pattern to be admired for its own sake.

Each piece is built entirely by hand, the leaf laid down building by building across an entire city, a job that can take months. When he came across Charles Booth’s 1889 map of London poverty, which colour-coded the city street by street from wealthy to poor, he redrew the whole thing in a single gold, quietly dissolving the hierarchy the original was made to enforce.