Still Playing is an immersive installation rooted in Zhao’s experience of living in Glasgow—a city where weathered, untamed surfaces coexist with the warmth and inclusiveness embedded in everyday life.

Visitors enter a space marked by childlike chalk drawings, scattered pieces of chalk, a picture book and a hopscotch path beginning with the word “Start”. A faint recording of children playing drifts through the otherwise empty room, leading them towards a blue-lit miniature playground placed on a worn wooden bench. From an adult’s standing height, the model appears finite and distant. A small instruction invites the viewer to crouch down and “borrow a child’s height”. At this lowered viewpoint, mirrored surfaces multiply the playground into an apparently endless landscape, its details come into focus, and a quiet music-box melody becomes audible. This embodied shift in perspective is central to the work: the viewer does not simply observe childhood, but temporarily returns to its scale.

The miniature draws on familiar Glasgow playgrounds, while its blue light evokes the city’s blue hour and overcast atmosphere. The worn bench, marks across the floor and abandoned objects reflect an environment that may initially appear rough or neglected, yet gradually reveals the intimacy, warmth and openness Zhao encountered within Glasgow’s everyday life.

Still Playing holds absence and presence, loss and warmth, and past and present within the same space. The children are gone, but their sounds and traces remain; the absent child may have become the adult now looking at the work. By crouching, the viewer briefly occupies both positions at once. The mirrored loop offers neither a complete return nor a final escape: childhood cannot be entered again, yet it has not disappeared. It continues within the present—as memory, sensation and a way of seeing.

1. Miniature Playground Box
3D-printed and hand-painted playground structures, custom-cut glass and mirrored panels, two LED light strips in different colours with custom-made diffusers, a timber base and lid, and handmade miniature trees, grass and gravel terrain.

2. Wooden Bench
A handmade wooden bench constructed from timber slats and wooden supports.

3. Surrounding Installation and Sound
Chalk and crayon floor drawings, scattered pieces of chalk, children’s books, a soft-toy dog, a paper dog sculpture, and two sound recordings played through separate speakers: children playing in a park and an adapted music-box melody.