Yan Xing's early works often met at the intersection of theory and literature. In 2012, he wrote a short story which, in a style resembling that of a news report, narrated the story of a Chinese-French artist born in the 1950s. In it he delineates the era in which this avant-garde artist lived, the currents of art history during that time, the artist’s representative works, and his unsung life in the arts. In the course of this performance, Yan Xing played the role of an art historian and eloquently told this story as well as displaying several of the fictional artist’s works. In getting the audience engrossed in a debate over the authenticity of the information, the artist cleverly completed his own new artwork.

This performance work integrated multiple mediums: art historical research, literary writing, oral storytelling through lectures, and video. Through his archival research, Yan Xing constructed a parallel historical reality. Using technologies from the fictional artist’s lifetime, he recreated the practices and experiments of individual artists in the global art context of the 1980s and 90s. By means of fiction, Yan Xing critically reexamines the very basis of what we have grown to accept as the authoritative global art history. Not only does Yan Xing's work blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, but the fiction it creates actually becomes part of reality.