The hill is called Daxiong Mountain. In Chinese, Daxiong is also the name of Nobita, Doraemon’s friend. It is a simple coincidence, but when I first came here more than ten years ago, it made me wonder whether Doraemon might be somewhere among the trees.

The thought still makes me smile when I remember it. This time, I finally used a camera to make something from that slightly pointless idea.

Daxiong Mountain is a small hill in Liangzhu, Hangzhou. Liangzhu Culture Village was built along its slopes. There are dense trees, paths, pavilions and benches. It was once a quiet, easy place to walk.

After the development and sale of the village's housing had finished, the hill, like many other public facilities, went largely untended for years. Things gradually aged. Rubbish gathered along the paths and among the trees. Most of the care it received came from volunteers, now and then.

In 2025, the Liangzhu Culture Village Public Welfare Foundation began a village-mountain care programme. Dozens of local businesses helped fund a series of public activities. Its first project, Green Mountains Facing Each Other, was curated by Song Chi. Together with Hua Yingxiong, six of us made a group photography exhibition on the hill.

My work in it was called Is There a Doraemon on Daxiong Mountain?

I took small Nobita and Doraemon figures up the hill and placed them in tree hollows, on branches, beside signs and in pavilions. Sometimes they were obvious; sometimes they almost disappeared into the trees, as if they had always been two small characters living there.

I often wondered which of his gadgets the blue robot cat might take out here. Perhaps a magnifying torch, to help the small trees and flowers grow faster. Perhaps a vacuum bag, to swallow all the litter and clutter. Perhaps a time cloth, to return the old pavilions and benches to their new condition.

These idle thoughts were a small secret between the hill and me. I hoped that other people might also see, in the photographs, spirits hidden among the trees.

For the exhibition, Song chose two materials. The larger works were printed on solid PVC banner fabric for clarity; others were printed on semi-transparent mesh and layered among the trees.

He said that from a distance, the clear banners would catch the eye first. Only when people came closer would Doraemon on the mesh slowly appear. “It is a process of looking,” he said, “as if you were looking for the spirits of this grove.”

A few days after the installation was finished, I brought the figures back to the hill on a rainy morning. I set them along the paths and around the works of the other photographers.

On the exhibition labels, I wrote that children could take a figure they liked, in the hope that it might leave a small piece of a fairy tale with them. There was only one request: please take away some litter too.

I made another set of photographs. Only then did I feel that the work had truly been installed.

After the exhibition opened, it brought a few interesting echoes.

Someone took a figure away, then later put it back. Strong wind and rain damaged the works several times, and some people helped to repair them. There were less harmonious things too: a few photographs and labels quietly disappeared, perhaps taken home to be “collected”. The guestbook and pens left on the hill also vanished quickly.

But there were more small exchanges between people, and between people and the hill. Someone on the path said they would bring their child to look for Doraemon. Messages also arrived from people who had seen an exhibition poster somewhere and felt pleasantly surprised.

Many times, I went up alone or with my family to see whether the works were still intact, and to pick up a little rubbish along the way. What began as an idle thought more than ten years ago eventually brought me back to this hill. None of that was something I had expected.

Later I thought: perhaps the magic device that keeps a hill beautiful has been in all of our hands from the beginning.