Amid revelations centred on ‘007’ bosses (who work from midday to midnight, seven days a week) and the ‘996’ system – (staff working from 9am to 9pm six days a week) the vision of China as a sleepless (and highly productive) society continues to gain symbolic currency. If speed, working overtime and the changing demands of ‘flexible capitalism’ have galvanised economic growth and cultural formations under the auspices of the Chinese Dream, this paper examines how artists in China are eschewing the politics of the ‘24/7 Universe’. Focusing on two works of contemporary art: Tang Dixin’s Rest is the Best Way of Revolution (2012-13) and Li Liao’s video A Single Bed No. 1 (2011), the paper explores how these artists enact the direct experience of sleep as a rarefied performance of everyday life. Examining this shift towards a politics of the quotidian as a means of acknowledging the affective estrangements associated with sleep, the paper argues that sleep increasingly shapes the contours and the spaces of disenfranchised lives. As a potentially radical, subversive activity, performances of public sleeping also challenge the necessity of hyper-mobile bodies harnessed to the narrative of national ascendancy. Drawing upon recent scholarship by Jonathan Crary to theorize images of sleep deprivation and disorder as an enduring effect of globalization, the paper delineates how these artists’ unexpected spaces of repose correlate with the downward mobility of many of China’s urban residents. By doing so, the paper aims to provide a foundation from which to rethink the politics of alienation and displacement in urban China.