Forbidden City foregrounds a ‘nail house’ against the landscape of the Forbidden City, a sacred site in China that holds equally profound socio-political significance following events that took place at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The city appears as a symbol of power and civilisation, but is conversely depicted as a sequence of distant lines in the sands of time, inferring a sense of deep time that renders the rise and fall of human empires as mere points in a constantly cyclical history.