(2020). A walk of eleven hours in a straight line across Beijing, from the Yongding River in the west to the Wenyu River in the east. The journey began with a single bottle of water collected from the Yongding, carried by hand as a silent witness to the shifting landscapes along the way. Though straight on a map, the route cut through urban sprawl, gated communities, highway underpasses, forgotten alleyways, and sites of constant construction and demolition.

As the walk moved through these contrasting environments, it became both performative and contemplative—an embodied mapping of the city’s spatial and social tensions. At Tiananmen Square, a site of deep political and historical weight, the water was stopped and questioned by police. Once its purpose was explained, it was allowed to continue—an encounter that underscored themes of surveillance, control, and volatility.

The walk concluded with the ceremonial act of pouring the Yongding water into the Wenyu River. This simple gesture connected two rivers otherwise divided by distance, infrastructure, and development, offering a quiet resistance to the fragmentation of ecosystems, histories, and communities. It spoke to the artificial boundaries imposed on natural and social flows.

This durational performance became a meditation on environmental change and urban fragmentation—how rivers, like cities and people, are shaped and reshaped by politics, planning, and power. It questioned the illusion of control: the containment of water, the scripting of space, the managing of meaning. In the act of carrying and releasing, the work revealed a deeper reflection on connection—between past and present, nature and infrastructure, intention and chance.