Simulation of Elsewhere
Chongqing
China, 2026

Simulation of Elsewhere analyses the relationship between urban spectacle, digital image culture and the desire for an elsewhere that seems increasingly unreachable. The work is based on photographs made in Chongqing, a city that represents a new phase in China’s urban development: not only rapid construction and high-rise density, but also the transformation of the city itself into a visual performance.

At night, Chongqing’s buildings become screens. Towers, banks and commercial façades are activated by light, slogans, animations and promotional messages. Within this field of urban self-presentation, Wilschut noticed idyllic digital landscapes appearing on enormous LED façades: mountains, forests, soft horizons and a sun, often placed between propaganda texts about the city and its future. These images function almost like oversized screensavers. They suggest calmness, nature and escape, but appear on the surfaces of the hyper-urban environment that has made such experiences feel increasingly distant.

The work questions this contradiction. What kind of longing is produced when a city projects images of nature onto its own financial and architectural skin? What happens when landscape no longer appears as a place to enter, but as a digital promise within systems of real estate, technology, economic growth and state narrative?

In this particular work, Wilschut photographed several projected landscapes and used fragments of them to construct a new digital landscape according to his own visual logic. The result is a photograph of a simulation, transformed into another simulation. The work reveals how contemporary cities produce not only space, but also desire. The elsewhere remains visible, luminous and seductive, yet always mediated, always behind the screen.