This project is a creative component that derives from the author’s essay, ‘The imaginary cultural landscape of the city and harbour in Quanzhou’. The changing interdependency of man with the sea, river, and cultural symbols in Quanzhou throughout history is transformed into an abstract miniature cube that aims to be an exhibition object. Simultaneously, the object metaphorises the heterotopic trait of the city and the harbour, and the citizens and the cultural landscape.

Images were initiated through phenomenological observations and the imaginations they aroused at the site. They explore different approaches to an exhibition which unfolds the relationship of the material environment and its users in the past and the present. Through the placement at specific locations and at juxtapositions of the historical and the contemporary, the cube and its environment recognises the complexity of the historical environment of the city, encouraging open-ended debates about the heritage of the Quanzhou.