A City within a City is an autobiographical project tracing the journey from the author's hometown of Meixi Lake in Changsha to Nine Elms in London. It seeks to argue that a new non-place is being constructed worldwide, exploring the change in the neighbourhood.

A companion book and a film are the major outputs. ‘The Cities of Lost Vines and Elms’ is a diary-based traveller’s notebook about the journey between the two cities, interweaving private memories with site archival material and critical research, emphasising the importance of local vernacular forms of regeneration. The film documents the similarity of the buildings on the journey. It evokes the flourishing of the hometown after its new construction, which contradicts the context of childhood loss, discussing the urban order in a broader geopolitical context.

A series of performative interventions are developed and installed on site in Nine Elms. Inviting the audience, they witness fragments of personal memories, superimposed landscapes, and writing postcards, proposing more diversified possibilities for urban development with embodied experience.