Jia began taking photos and videos for The Road Series during her first visit to Europe to attend Documenta 12 in 2007. During her first long drive, she quickly saw that the car in which she found herself, and the country she traversed were, for many Chinese, the material embodiments of consumerist aspirations that consumed their lives at the expense of any adequate perception of the values that permeate their own tradition. Even as these works allude to the artist-contrived triple perspectives of traditional Chinese landscape, the same indistinctness at the heart of their visual attraction also conceals from the viewer any accurate perception of their location, or their perception of depth, time, or even the nature of objects in the field of view. With some measure of irony, the artist recalls in this context, a quotation from the Chinese Classic of History, 772 – 476 BC: “The road is as truth not far from us.”