NSC (New Sky City) is a speculative project comprising a newspaper (NSC 1.0) and a life-size video installation (NSC 2.0), imagining a dystopian society set in the year 2117. Combining analogue and digital media, the work constructs a fictional world that reflects on humanity’s potential trajectory under extreme materialism and environmental collapse.

The project draws inspiration from Sky City, a proposed skyscraper in Changsha, China, once intended to become the tallest building in the world. Environmental protests halted construction before it began, and the site was later repurposed as a fish farm. This unfinished megastructure becomes the starting point for Li’s speculative reimagining imagined as realised in the future.

NSC 1.0 takes the form of a mass-produced newspaper written in the voice of a reporter and distributed to the public during Producing Future Homes and Communities as part of Tate Exchange at Tate Modern. In this fictional future, natural resources are exhausted and the Earth has become uninhabitable. Humanity survives inside towering skyscrapers, confined to preservation tanks and living entirely within artificial virtual environments. Social interaction occurs through digital projections, offering a sanitised existence detached from the physical world.

NSC 2.0 expands this narrative into a 3D animated video installation. Real performers were filmed underwater in a custom-built green-screen tank and integrated into the digital environment. Presented through projection mapping across three walls, the installation creates an immersive space that allows viewers to step inside the imagined world.