This project is a research-driven work centered on imaging, intertwining photographic experimentation with performative action, rooted in my personal experience growing up in inland China. Born on a plain far from the sea, I have never truly encountered it, yet the sea has always existed in my imagination—symbolizing freedom, distance, and the possibility of departure. At the same time, childhood fears of water, coupled with my inability to swim, render the sea a space I cannot approach. Rather than attempting to reproduce the sea itself, I begin from a position of “inaccessibility,” seeking to evoke its presence through modes of looking, photographic materials, and bodily engagement. By photographing the Yellow River, lakes, and other inland waters and presenting them in ways that suggest the sea, I gradually abstract these rivers from their fixed geographical identities, allowing them to emerge in the images as boundless surfaces of water. The project culminates in a performative video work: I carry drift bottles filled with seawater and images to the banks of the Yellow River and release the images into the current. This gesture is not symbolic; it is a practice in which the images, rather than my body, enter the water. The work unfolds along the tensions between longing and fear, imagination and materiality, inland and ocean, exploring whether a form of proximity can exist when the body itself cannot reach the sea.