25.3KM is a theatrical action taking place on an ongoing bus; it premiered in Beijing on December 31, 2013.

 

The audience should wait at a bus stop for ‘entrance,' and a bus will pick them up and lead them to experience the whole process of this action. The bus winds its way across the city, associating mutual city memories with the audience by playing location-related music and sounds through the earphones distributed to them.

 

Here, the regular bus turns to an auditorium and the entire town is transformed into a moving stage. At one point, the performing bus portrays back to its nature again—as ‘a real bus’, with passengers getting on and off, in which case, the work of art and the trace of real life overlaps together.

 

From the busy city centre, and traversing the suburbs, to the landscape on the very edge of the city, the journey almost gets lost in the evolving urban ecology. At the urban edge, the blaze of light that intersperses the city becomes a far-off skyline, and somewhere in the bleaker wilderness, appears a desk, a lamp, and a person, who is typing on a keyboard and then printing.

 

Followed this lead, the audience walks toward the performer through wild tussock, and witnesses the performer handing a pile of printed files over to another performer, who brings the files back to the bus.

 

Those printed files are being read literally by performers huddled under the touch light on the way back on the bus, and what is contained in them are biographies of ordinary people who died during this year.