«Cities, like dreams, are built of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules illogical, their perspectives deceptive, and everything hides something else. » (Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities)

I believe they represent great Chinese pride: the 375m high Jin Mao Tower, the 637m high Shanghai Tower and the World Financial Center 492m. Or at least, they are willingly shown as such to the objective of a Western photographer.

This was one of the biggest surprises of my trip: incredulous in Shanghai I met the “Manhattan” of the East. In the presence of majestic skylines, I understood that my photographic reportage could not ignore the astonishing geometric shapes of the towers, of the skyscrapers raised by decades of gentrification.

An uninterrupted proscenium that surprised me around every corner, wherever my gaze was directed, at a road intersection: from the “FFC Former French Concession” in Pudong, through Jing’an and Huangpu.

The architect Yona Friedman says it well «… It’s like in theater, the scenography is important […] but when we talk about space in the sense of architecture, we perceive it as if we were animals who also hear what they don’t see, for example what is above, on the roofs. »

Well, then I strongly wanted my gaze to move away from the conformed space, at eye sight, at the street level. And I let him soar in the hideouts between one skyscraper and another, as much as wanting to glimpse the sky from the depths of a fir forest. To recognize a place even from its notoriously invisible profiles.