Upon visiting Shanghai in 2009, I was immediately impressed by the way traffic flowed. Cars, scooters, trikes, bicycles and pedestrians weaved through the packed city streets with little regard for signals or rules. Yet everyone seemed to get where they were going in one piece.

I was also fascinated with how scooters and bicycles were used as real machines: carrying massive loads of recycling, delivering precarious towers of goods, or ferrying an entire family.

I took hundreds of traffic photos with a plan to do something with the images at a later date. SHANGHAI SCOOTERS is the resulting project, 20 gouache and ink drawings of the city’s vehicles and their riders.

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