A Train Across the Dunes Towards the Future is an interdisciplinary performance research project exploring place, time, memory, disappearance and the body.

The project began with an image of a train travelling across an unfamiliar landscape. A train carries the body through space while the world outside is constantly changing. It offers a particular way of seeing: fragments of places appear through a window, remain for a moment, and disappear again.

The work grew from an earlier exploration of 1626, a place where Max was born and grew up in Hong Kong. While 1626 began with a specific lived space, A Train Across the Dunes Towards the Future moves beyond a particular building or city to consider what happens when our relationship with place becomes unstable. A home can disappear. A landscape can change. A memory can remain, but it can never fully return us to the place it came from.

The train becomes a shifting structure rather than a literal journey. It suggests movement without a fixed destination: the body remains within a moving space while perspectives, images and environments continually change around it.

The project brings together installation, choreography, live camera, projection, lighting and live cello to create a changing spatial environment. A constructed model and the performing body become part of the same visual system. Live images can enlarge a small space, alter its scale, or place the body inside a landscape that does not physically exist around it. Sound and image respond to the movement and transformation of the space.

Rather than telling a linear story, the work develops through fragments — a room, a window, a passing landscape, a body, a trace of memory. These elements are rearranged and observed from different perspectives, creating a space where what is real, remembered and imagined can overlap.

The future in the work is not treated simply as a destination to be reached. It is a condition of continuous movement, where the present is always changing and the past cannot be returned to in exactly the same way.

A Train Across the Dunes Towards the Future asks how we experience time and place when the spaces we know are changing, disappearing or becoming impossible to return to.