Drawing upon research on a systematic body of texts and scholarly tradition in the Western cultural discourse, Wang Huimeng’s practice spans performance, installation, video, sculpture, and the Internet, illustrating the structure and employment of cultural domination. In Orientalism, Edward Said famously identifies the links between linguistics and anatomy, specifying that a learned Orientalist’s attitude was often “that of a scientist who surveyed a series of textual fragments,” and it’s not the Orient that’s given on the page, but “a truncated exaggeration” of it. Utilizing this canonical approach in its most literal sense, Wang’s sculpture This Might Not Be the Darkest Time of Your Life… or It Might! culls textual objects from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, where an American sailor relates his trip down the Yangtze Kiang in a stream-of-consciousness narration, presenting the Orient as an exotic locale filled with visions of cruelty, terror, sublimity, hostility, and barbaric splendor. In Wang’s work, these restored textual fragments, framed by a scientific (and what Said would call celibate) structure, against what they initially represented, form a new reality. The previous imagination of the East becomes the material, and the East becomes a performed experience of the Western narrator himself in an almost comical way.