This work documents a round-trip journey along the waterways of Hamburg, Germany. Through a continuously moving, almost mechanical gaze, the video captures the shifting landscapes between the harbor and the river channels. Juxtaposed with these European aquatic scenes are the oral memories of the artist's grandfather regarding the shipping routes between Niuzhuang and Yingkou in Northeast China, alongside an overlap of ambient sounds from both locations.

 

Niuzhuang was once designated as a treaty port in the nineteenth century, yet was replaced by Yingkou at the moment of its opening. In historical narratives it has been repeatedly displaced, compressed, and blurred: from being ‘named’ to being ‘substituted,’ from a coordinate on the map back to a small locality sustained by situated experience. The gap between institutional narratives and local memory renders its history marked by a persistent dislocation. 

 

The beginning and end of the video feature motifs from "Der Abschied" (The Farewell), the sixth movement of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, based on ancient Chinese poetry. Mahler’s "misreading" of Tang poetry within a German musical context creates an intertextuality with the grandfather's archival voice—fragmented, colloquial, and poetic. The grandfather’s narration serves as a faint, private navigation—it does not point to the visible paths on screen but leads toward a world constructed of bodily memory, localized time, and obscured histories. Here, the route is no longer defined by port systems; instead, through the interlacing of sound and image, it completes an act of reclamation that never truly arrives.