Yornel Martínez is a Cuban artist whose practice subverts the function of discursive objects—books, maps, and texts—to uncover new meanings and challenge the limits of language. This work, La pequeña china, belongs to a broader series in which the artist engages with the visual language of cartography. In this specific work, Martínez depicts China as a small yellow shape adrift within a global map composed entirely of ocean.The absence of other countries for context emphasizes the perceived relationship between national and global scale.