Living Mountain depicts the sublime landscape of a mountainous river valley, pierced by a prominent ‘nail house’: a term borrowed from the Chinese proverb: “the nail that sticks up will be hammered down,” used in China to refer to properties whose residents defy state-sanctioned developers’ demands to sell. The landscape is in fact the area of the Yangtze River dammed by the controversial Three Gorges Dam, whose construction displaced communities and flooded 1300 archaeological sites. Cheung’s employment of nail houses, now censored symbols of resistance, unravels the conceptual framework of the traditional Chinese landscape painting, intended to induce a psychic state of dream travel, but also related to the omnipresence of dynastic civilisation.