In the exhibition, Shen Shaomin examined the Tiananmen (Gate of Heavenly Peace), Beijing, and the Chinese art of penjing, an ancient Chinese art form of creating landscape scenes on a miniature scale, also known as bonsai.  The artist carried out a detailed inspection of the structure of the gate and the ground beneath it to create a different communal experience of a  structure which is "integral to the psychological makeup of generations of Chinese people."

The Bonsai project examined the perversion behind deeply rooted systems of thought formed by tradition and culture that determine the value of things residing in the aesthetic and/or morals. Using the torture 
inflicted on the plants,  Shen raised issues of "cultural control and distortion, as well as our involvement in allowing the systems that sustain such control to endure". 

Our archival collections have been catalogued following the International Standard of Archival Description (ISAD(G)) and principles of Records in Context (RiC). The library collection has been documented following the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) standard and the International Standard for Bibliographic Description (ISBD).

Subject terms for the collections have been taken from the Resource Description Access (RDA) values which are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License; the National Archives’ PRONOM online registry of technical information; IANA media types. MIME types; Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)® and Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN)® which are made available under the ODC Attribution License.