Hongxi Li: Sandcastle

The performance presents an anonymous, suited figure as an archetype of authority, who blows his whistle, signalling Li’s fictional persona, dressed in a crisply ironed grey suit and white blouse, to build sandcastles in the mud. With increasing urgency, Jolene begins rapidly crafting sandcastles, revealing that the bucket she uses is a mould, shaped like a brutalist housing block—a direct evocation of the mass-produced residential towers that emerged during China’s real estate boom. Each movement she makes is charged with an escalating intensity, mirroring the relentless pace of industrialised construction.

The act of building sandcastles unfolds within the boundaries of a chrome frame—a borderless, open structure suggesting that Li could, in theory, leave at any time. Though of course, she does not, exclusively entering and leaving through the small gate at the front of the pit, obeying the call of the whistle thus depicting a world under industrial production. This mechanisation and standardisation of labour not only dominate the space but infiltrate every facet of life, leaking beyond the physical boundaries. Rather than establishing fixed limits, this performance asks the viewer to reconsider borders as sites of continuity—porous edges where control and freedom become indistinguishable.

As Jolene moulds the soil into a miniature cityscape, her repetitive actions recall the industrially mechanised processes of mass urban development in China, where urban population has grown from around 18% to over 60% today. Jolene’s sandcastles, much like the increased production of cityscapes, are characterised by standardisation. The artist becomes increasingly flustered as her time dwindles, and her sandcastles refuse to be still: collapsing as she hurries to each edge of the pit trying to hold them up, without success. Her hands, skirt and formerly pristine white shirt, are bloodied in mud: peppered by her own failed production. 

Citing the Freudian model, in Sandcastle, trauma is acted out both hysterically and laboriously, abstract and literal, into performances that are immanent and allegorical. Jolene does just this: enacting out both the hysterical iterations of her own trauma, failure or pressure to produce, as she also reveals to her the perpetuation of her own labour, as both a product and symptom of the system she finds herself enmeshed in.

The piece is punctured by the whistle blows, marking the start and end— shaped by the silence that surrounds it. As Li continues to build sandcastles out of mud, each castle becomes less solid. The more that Li seeks to build in the mud, the more vulnerable her structures are to collapse, much like the reality of the artist’s home country, China, where infrastructure and quality is compromised given increased influx of cityscapes. 

Li’s sandcastles ask us how we might distinguish between two processes with regards to increased urbanisation: destructive, and restorative, and what might reconcile these conflicting urges––for Jolene, there is no solution, only evasion, as she hurries out with her head bowed and her hands covered in mud, recalling an almost Macbethian bloodied-handed guilt. The work in this sense functions as transactive, rather than communicative, touching us but not necessarily revealing the secret— or the remedy, which is up to the discretion of the viewer. The viewer observes Jolene building a dozen castles, distancing ourselves from her sordid production, we laugh when a castle falls, applaud when she leaves her structure-dominated pit of mud. We too, in Nietzschean terms,  are victims of our own performance, complicit in a cycle that commodifies both labour and observation. 

As we, the audience, wait for Li to begin her task of creating sandcastles, the initial act may seem enigmatic—imbued with a sense of mystery and ritual. However, by the fourth repetition, this sense of intrigue gives way to frustration, as we witness the inevitable collapse of her efforts, symbolic of labour’s futility under exploitative systems. Each time the sandcastles crumble, the tension escalates, and Li visibly strains under the weight of the suited man’s whistle, embodying the crushing pressures of industrial demands of productivity.

The bond between Li and the other – whether audience or the timekeeper/authority figure – is one structured by obedience, anonymity, and a deep sense of responsibility. Yet this relationship is not one of mutual recognition; it is a bond defined by coercion and the impersonal dynamics of power. The audience’s frustration parallels the alienation experienced in modern labour, where repetition devoid of meaningful progression leads to a sense of dislocation from time, self, and others. 

The relentless recurrence of the same task not only disorients our temporal understanding but also problematises the notion of belonging—Li’s actions are disconnected from any real sense of community or shared purpose, as she is bound to the clockwork rhythm of command. The unrelenting nature of the performance critiques the dehumanising effects of labour, repetition, and the erasure of individual agency under systems of control, ultimately questioning the very possibility of belonging within such structures.

The nature of the performance, characterised by its temporal and spatial specificity, resists the fixity of reproducibility, rendering it inherently ephemeral and elusive. This transient quality becomes a metaphor for the broader crisis it engages with—namely, the instability and precarity that define contemporary modes of labour and production under late capitalism. In contrast to fixed, commodifiable works, the performance’s refusal to be fully ‘capturable’ mirrors the increasingly fragmented nature of work, where boundaries between labour, time, and space blur, leading to a perpetual state of impermanence, thus critiquing the neoliberal paradigm, where nothing is solid or secure and is built only to collapse. In this way, the performative act operates as a critical intervention, highlighting the collapse of stable structures in both the artwork and life.

Serving as a powerful critique of capitalist structures, where authority, labour, and repetition intertwine to create a sense of alienation and precarity, Sandcastle reflects the futility of labour under constant surveillance, interrogating the role of temporality and belonging within this system. Li’s strained relationship with authority, speaks to the broader societal dynamics of coercion, where autonomy and agency are subsumed by the relentless demands of production. Through its cyclical, ephemeral nature, the performance challenges us to reconsider the possibility of resistance, liberation, and belonging within a system that is continuously erosive.