Living in shelters built up for migrant workers, the small group of artists from different parts of China gathered and created collaborative performance work in and around the area.

Zhang Huan, Zhu Ming and Ma Liuming, the leading artists of the community, mainly focused their works on exploring and reflecting “gender, sexuality, and physical and psychological endurance.

According to Zhang Huan's associate Kong Bu, the project began at 13:00 with two surveyors, Jin Kui and Xiong Wen, setting up their equipment to measure the height of the Miaofeng Mountain, which was 86.393 meters.

[13] An audience of SFMOMA’s exhibition “Art and China after 1989” commented that To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain reminded her of "the piles of dead, naked Jewish people in the Holocaust."

According to Yu Yeon Kim, an independent curator of many distinguished international exhibitions of contemporary art, To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain deals with complex issues of identity, spiritualism, vulnerability, and transgression.

To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain received international acclaim at the 48th Venice Biennial in 1999 and is still considered "a monumental work in the history of Chinese performance art.

"[16] Zuoxiao Zuzhou, one of the Beijing East-Village artists involved in To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, reproduced the performance art work in 2007 by replacing the nudity with pigs.