This work was filmed along the waterways of Hamburg, tracing a continuous movement of looking between the port and the river. Placed in parallel with these sounds from Niuzhuang andYingkou in Northeast China, together with the artist’s grandfather’s oral recollections of the river route once connecting the two places. Though stemming from different times, geographies, and historical conditions, these materials converge and coexist within a single continuous sequence.

Niuzhuang was once designated as a treaty port in the nineteenth century, yet was replaced by Yingkou at the moment of its opening. In historical narratives it has been repeatedly displaced, compressed, and blurred: from being ‘named’ to being ‘substituted,’ from a coordinate on the map back to a small locality sustained by situated experience. The gap between institutional narratives and local memory renders its history marked by a persistent ‘dislocation. ’ The waterways and voices that appear in the work therefore carry traces of a geography partly obscured, and of personal routes absent from official accounts.

Within the disjunction between image and sound, the spatial reality in the film resists clear identification. The grandfather’s voice becomes a faint and intimate mode of navigation, pointing toward a world that diverges from the visible path of the camera. A sense of route and geography emerges not through the definitions of the state, the map, or the port system, but through embodied memory, localised time, and a history that continually shifts its contours.