At the invitation of director Chen Minghao, Xu Zhen, Lu Pingyuan, and Liu Ning joined the collaboration on the theatre production City of Fiction as an artistic advisory team. Works by artists including Ma Qiusha, Yang Di, Wang Sishun, and Yu Zhou were also invited to take part in the production.

This collaboration is a shared exploration of the “contemporary theatre scene.” Starting from Yu Hua’s novel City of Fiction, the director’s team and the artists discussed how the novel’s historical experience, rural memory, gender relations, the individual’s space for survival within a larger historical era, and its narrative structure drifting between the magical and the real might be activated within today’s understanding of reality. The creators are particularly concerned with how City of Fiction can become a theatrical point of departure that responds to contemporary Chinese social experience.

Aranya is both a seaside community and a contemporary site where natural landscape and public activities intersect. The relationship between resort space and theatrical space also allows City of Fiction to be understood not merely as a story set within a traditional Chinese narrative, but as something that can be repositioned within a more complex international perspective and contemporary living context.