Almost 40 years ago, city planners in Beijing introduced tactile yellow paving slabs to support visually impaired residents. While well-intentioned, the long-term implementation faced challenges as the city rapidly evolved—sometimes rendering the pathways difficult or even unsafe to use.
Artist Rong Bao draws from this complex urban reality in her new work Yellow Path (2024), using the tactile paving as a poignant symbol to reflect on the broader, often overlooked barriers that persons with disabilities continue to face. Her work invites viewers to consider how accessibility efforts can fall short when not sustained or meaningfully integrated, especially in fast-changing environments.
As theCOLAB Senior Project Manager Alice Walters notes, “[Over the years] the visually impaired users have been forgotten as buildings rise and fall in the rapidly developing urban landscape.” Bao’s artistic response brings renewed visibility to this issue, reframing a once-promising design feature into a powerful commentary on inclusion and progress.
Bao’s installation is essentially a never-ending square pathway made of bright yellow blocks that leads directly back onto itself, so participants find themselves going round and round, but never getting anywhere. Inscribed into the blocks in braille are the words of visually impaired artist and poet Alex Donnelly.
“Through this work, I invite people to experience a sense of disorientation, prompting them to reflect on accessibility, urban design, and whose needs are truly considered in public spaces”, explains Bao. “For me, it’s more than just an art installation—it is an emotional expression and a critique of urban planning.”
The work appears simple at first glance, but with time it reveals layers of meaning and impact. And all are welcome to experience the piece, but it’s up to each individual how deeply they would like to engage with its ideas and commentary.
“It represents my concern for marginalized voices and my reflection on how cities are designed,” says Bao. “The work also challenges conventional ways of experiencing sculpture by engaging multiple senses, allowing audiences to understand the world beyond vision. It is a personal and social statement, merging tactile experience, poetry, and movement to create an alternative way of perceiving space.
The work was first unveiled at the opening event for MARY MARY, a major exhibition in central London of outdoor public sculpture by nine women artists. Located in The Artist’s Garden, the once neglected space on the rooftop of Temple tube station, it’s the world’s first sculpture garden dedicated to women artists and was established by theCOLAB (a “collactive laboratory” supporting the work of local and international artists) in 2021.
Yellow Path was first presented with a performance by 12 black-clad artists from the Chinese community in London following the pathway on its endless and pointless circular route, an experience that Bao describes as having been “deeply moving and reassuring”. It has since been experienced by thousands of visitors, with up to 60,000 expected by the time the exhibition closes in September 2025. The warm reception of the work by the general public has been poignant for Bao.
“Seeing people actively engage with the work—walking on the path, feeling the texture, and experiencing the confusion of direction—made me realize that the message was truly reaching them,” she says. “Some people walked in silence, while others discussed their experiences and reflections with me. That moment confirmed the power of participatory art in fostering empathy and awareness. Every response, whether curiosity, frustration, or contemplation, reinforced the work’s purpose.”
London audiences are familiar with Bao’s work, as she presented her first solo exhibition at Saatchi Gallery in 2024. Yet she is a community-minded artist and approached this work with a true collaborative spirit. To gain the knowledge and sensitivity needed to approach this topic in the correct way, she reached out to members of the visually impaired communities in Beijing and London to inform the development of the work, built a partnership with Donnelly and consulted braille experts at the RNIB. This was all made possible through the Connection through Culture grant that Bao was awarded by the British Council.
“Collaboration grants like CTC are vital sources of funding for realising ambitious artistic projects that celebrate cultural diversity and cross-cultural exchange,” Walter says. “The grant fosters cross-cultural dialogue between organisation and artist, supports long-term partnerships with global reach, building ties beyond the organisation’s local community.”
Building bridges between communities and growing connections between artists and their audiences are the core of the CTC grant program, which actively encourages artists, organisations and audiences from each partner country to learn from one another, to be challenged and surprised by one another, to transcend diverse experiences and to gain insights into areas of shared and differing interest.
“This grant enabled Rong to translate her very localised and specific experience of urban planning in Beijing, into a poetic, multi-sensory exploration of accessibility and inclusion that is relatable on a global level,” Walter says.
Yellow Path can be viewed as part of the MARY MARY exhibition in The Artist’s Garden on the roof of Temple tube station, London until September 2025.