MDes Graphic Design/Illustration/Photography School of Design
Sijie Lu (Lusi)
Sijie is a photographer from China, currently based in Glasgow. With an early background in film making, she later shifted her focus to photography, where she continues to explore the tension between documentary and conceptual practices.
Her work often begins from the perspective of the urban flâneur, transforming fleeting moments of light, space, and human presence into poetic visual fragments. She engages with themes of solitude, identity, and cross-cultural adaptation, seeking to uncover the subtle emotions and social dynamics embedded within the everyday.
Her practice functions both as a form of observation and as a projection of inner landscapes, inviting viewers not only to look but to enter into a sensorial dialogue with the image.
Sight in Light
I explore Glasgow through my camera. As a modern flâneur, I wandered the streets not to intervene but to observe, allowing the city to reveal itself in fleeting light and shadow. While many associate Glasgow with rain, cold winds, and grey skies, I discovered another impression: shafts of light slicing across architecture, shadows shaping human presence, and moments when the ordinary turns poetic. Sight in Light is at once a portrait of the city and a reflection of my inner landscape.
Dimensions of Waste
This project is a thematic creation based on visual illusion, presented through environmental art photography. The photographed objects were all collected from the streets of Glasgow (the largest city in Scotland) city centre, including cigarette butts, and aluminum cans. These fragments of urban debris are creatively transformed to break conventional spatial perception, producing striking 3D illusionary effects.
As an artist from a second-tier city in China, my first impression of Glasgow was its prosperity. Yet after just a week of living here, I was often confronted by the litter scattered across the streets. On windy days in particular, the debris was blown into the air and swept throughout the city, making its presence impossible to ignore. This visual and emotional impact became the starting point for my reflection on urban environmental issues and the motivation behind this series.
The series not only showcases the visual impact of consumerism’s remnants but also highlights the tension between urban development and environmental sustainability. Through this transformation, the work invites viewers to reflect on their own relationship with the environment and to engage more actively with sustainable practices.
