Dangerous Afternoon (2017) visually recounts a paranoid tale about urban civilization through an exhibition. Yan Xing uses a variety of mediums–film, performance, photography, painting, installation, and texts–to tell the story of a museum curator who hopelessly falls in love with a stranger's feet. This man, as a condition for satisfying the curator’s desires, demands to spend a night with the curator's wife. Caught in this predicament, the normally autocratic curator pours his desire, anger, frustration, and hesitation into the exhibition he is curating. The exhibition as the curator's creation becomes a tool for projecting his reality.

This reality is represented and fictionally reshaped, albeit in a blurred fashion, by various pieces of evidence that recur throughout the exhibition. For example, the dismantled ceiling lamp comes from the curator Elena Filipovic's office at Kunsthalle Basel. Then there is the grisaille painting of Cezanne's L'Après-midi à Naples (c. 1875) partially covering an area of mural scratches on a wall in the exhibition, while the original L'Après-midi à Naples is being exhibited simultaneously in the Kunstmuseum Basel nearby. A personal letter to Markus Schinwald seems to bring the real art world before our eyes. In the museum's last exhibition hall, a short video shown on a monitor captures the moment when a man and woman meet at the Tinguely Fountain in the square below, which can be seen through the window from the exact same spot. Is this the outcome of a decision made by the fictional curator after a long struggle? This complex work constructs a marginal, sexy, and exquisitely modern story, raising a series of interrelated questions about power, gender, class, morality, and aesthetics.