Yan Xing‘s early works question the heterogeneity of the transmission of Western classics within a Chinese context. Here he deconstructed seven paintings by Edward Hopper (1882-1967). After dismantling and reassembling the original works, he set up film sets using the composition of the originals as reference. The resulting video features Yan Xing and his friends from the Beijing art world, and the artistic reality in the works is related to the artist's own experiences and projections. Situated between pantomime and silent film, this video work recreates and interprets canonical artworks, and it establishes a new way of experiencing paintings through performance. In doing so, it presents an alternative hypothesis on the contemporaneity of Western images in alien cultural surroundings.