Early Christian scholars believed that there was an earthly Garden of Eden on the other side of the earth over the ocean. In the 14th century, the Catalan Atlas added the landscape of China, including Cambaluc (today’s Beijing, the capital of the Yuan dynasty), Hangzhou, Citong (today’s Quanzhou) and Guangzhou, to the world map for the very first time. A century later, we ushered in the Age of Exploration in the Portuguese’s pursuit of exploring the world with the help of navigation map, and the global landscape then changed. Later, Matteo Ricci, an Italian missionary who was sent to Macao, brought the world map to China.
The map indicated meanings at various levels, an important one being recording the process of human beings exploring the world in the form of images, which were witnesses of globalization and the integration of civilizations. Ancient maps being the carrier, this work depicts the world in different times and spaces by imitating the ways of making delicate maps and religious paintings in the Age of Exploration. As the mismatched images are created based on reality but are also surrealistic, which makes them ridiculous and unreal, the work is an experimental work that extends and even subverts the functions of maps.