Deep inside Shanghai, a turn into one of the narrow lanes of Tianzifang brought us face to face with a wall that somehow seemed to behave like the city itself. Shop signs, tangled cables, people and movement surround you here, and on this wall that same density had been drawn entirely in line.
The closer we looked, the more appeared. Human figures mingle with animals, food, signs, fragments of labour and touches of mythology. Everything happens simultaneously. There is no obvious beginning or end, no hierarchy telling your eye where to go first. It reads almost like one long sentence without punctuation.
And yet what struck us most was what wasn’t there: colour. For an image so full of life, the mural is completely monochrome. Somehow, that absence makes you imagine the colours yourself — as if Shanghai supplies them from everything happening around it.
When translated into textiles, we did exactly that. We let colour into this extraordinary black-and-white world, allowing its figures, lines and tiny details to travel across the fabric in an entirely new way. What started as a monochrome portrait of Shanghai became Bao Bao — still wonderfully crowded, only no longer quiet in colour.
