After immigrating to the United States, Yan Xing briefly enmeshed himself in the clash between Chinese history and American narratives. To do so, in 2015, he established the "Honourable East India Institute," a fictional organization allegedly founded in Honningsvik, Norway, in 2009. An academic institution dedicated to research on the Far East, it not only purports to promote interdisciplinary collaboration, but also to re-examine the flaws and failures of East Asian Studies in historical contexts.

In 2015, Yan Xing was commissioned by the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco to develop a performance. Capitalizing upon the museum's authority in curating Asian art within an American context, he temporarily housed the Honourable East India Institute there to sponsor and organize "Lessons on the Far East" under its fictional auspices. Yan Xing invited then-Associate Professor Thomas Mullaney from Stanford University's Department of History and Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom from the History Department at the University of California, Irvine, to participate. They performed two distinguished scholars from different generations who hold radically divergent views on how to interpret China. Their hour-long conversation humorously reflected changing academic ideas and alterations in historical narratives through persistent and stubbornly reiterated arguments. This somewhat awkward academic debate not only showcased the evolving nature of the "Far East" concept, but also revealed the instability of knowledge in the face of geopolitical changes.

In this performance, Yan Xing remained invisible. He acted as the organizer behind the scene, harnessing academic authority to deconstruct the contradictions between globalization and cultural diversity, while also providing a stage for resolving these contradictions. The fictional frame of ”'Lessons on the Far East” aims to provide an escape from the constraints that identity anxiety can place on artistic practice. This is a rare work by Yan Xing that directly addresses the binary opposition of Eastern and Western civilizations.