Abstract ASSET ARREST is an ongoing, long-term artistic research project that investigates the socio-spatial effects of financialised housing through fieldwork, and published mainly as a podcast series. Developed initially through research into housing speculation in the UK, the project operates as a methodological framework for examining how real estate systems shape everyday life, perception and urban narrative.

My relocation to China in 2023 expanded this inquiry into contexts frequently framed through the metaphor of the “ghost.” Terms such as “ghost city,” “ghost mall,” and “ghost development” circulate widely in Western media, where images of under-occupied Chinese urban environments are mobilised as shorthand for speculative excess and systemic failure. Rather than treating these metaphors as descriptive, this exploration approaches them as conceptual devices that organise how Chinese urbanisation becomes legible to distant audiences.

Drawing on field research conducted in Ordos’ Kangbashi district, the paper examines how the “ghost” condenses complex developmental temporalities into a singular aesthetic of absence. In doing so, it risks minoritising alternative urban conceptual worlds: processes of anticipation, phased inhabitation, infrastructural lag, and speculative continuity that resist the binary of success and failure.

Positioning ASSET ARREST as a practice of situated investigation, I explore how artistic research can intervene in this epistemic flattening. Through audio, field recording and observational methods, the project foregrounds slower, locally embedded accounts of development that exceed the spectacle of emptiness. Rather than seeking to correct representation, the research works to reopen the conceptual field within which urban futures are imagined, proposing artistic research as a means of engaging with precarious and partially unsayable forms of infrastructural knowledge.