Yan Xing shapes stories by playing various roles. His interests are not limited to studying the past, but he also references ongoing contemporary art practices. Since 2012, Yan Xing has been researching Chinese artist Duan Jianyu (born in 1970, now living and working in Guangzhou). Duan Jianyu has had a broad influence on contemporary Chinese art with her uniquely absurd and humorous paintings, in which she draws upon urban legends and rural folk customs to point directly at the neuralgic points of Chinese reality. She often uses her paintings to illustrate short stories written by herself, thereby integrating narrative and imagery. In 2013, Yan Xing undertook a challenging yet fascinating trip in which he followed some of the protagonists of Duan Jianyu's works and visited the “New Villages” and cityscapes created by China's urbanization. As he traveled from Xining in Qinghai by way of Shaoguan in Guangdong to Sanya in Hainan, he obsessively searched for fictional locations that never existed, while at the same time zeroing in on certain concrete places, where he painted the kind of on-site landscape paintings that a traditional artist would be expected to produce. The landscapes mentioned in Duan Jianyu's works eventually came to overlap with the plein-air sketches created by Yan Xing, and Duan Jianyu's fictional locations became contiguous with the real locations Yan Xing had identified.

Yan Xing's creations integrate performance with other mediums. Transcending performances in traditional spaces, his performances permeate the process of art creation and become part of his narrative concept. In this work, where true and false have become indistinguishable, Yan Xing probes the thin line between art and fiction, discusses the notion of artistic influence, and re-examines the external world we inhabit in daily life, as the story of art goes on alongside.