Sandcastle is a 30-minute performance exploring land possession and urbanisation through Jolene, Hongxi Li’s fictional persona. The work probes the human desire for land ownership and the impact of urban expansion on natural landscapes, questioning the complexities embedded in contemporary ideas of progress.

A child-sized handcrafted British-style garden gate leads into a soil pit filled with nearly one ton of earth, often locally sourced or recycled to respond to the characteristics of each site. As an iconic symbol of domestic territory, privacy, and property boundaries, the gate is accessible to children yet requires adults to crawl through, establishing a threshold of control, ownership, and power.

The performance begins with a whistle from an East Asian male supervisor. Jolene crawls through the gate holding a metal bucket that reveals itself as a mould for a brutalist housing block, evoking the residential towers built en masse during China’s early-2000s real-estate boom. Repeatedly shaping soil into a miniature cityscape, her actions echo childhood sandcastle building while mirroring the mechanised logic of industrial development defined by speed, replication, and standardisation. The performance reflects on the legacy of mass urbanisation in Li’s native China, one of the most dramatic demographic transformations in recent history.

As pressure builds, structures crumble, recalling the fragility of rapid construction and the phenomenon of “tofu-dreg” architecture. With the final whistle, Jolene exits in a dirt-stained corporate uniform, leaving the miniature city to its uncertain fate.