This article explores the methodological possibilities of using meditation, breath, and affects to situate contemporary Chinese art, particularly Zhang Huan's 12 Square Meters and He Chengyao's 99 Needles. Through the haptic dimensions embedded within meditation, I complicate the oft-deployed frameworks of endurance art and conscious resistance applied to Chinese artists that “challenge” the state. I propose lingering as an alternative possibility for durational, time-based practices. Drawing from Henri Bergson's accounts of duration, lingering emphasizes indeterminate and slippery experiences within time that shift away from masculinist notions of linearity and intention. The indeterminacy and failures of lingering destabilize how Chinese artists are often understood as conscious, agentic actors who perform resistance through endurance. Lingering, self-practice, and meditation renegotiate and temper our normative and ableist understandings of agency, resistance, and consciousness. As such, this article contributes to disability and new materialist engagements with normative modes of consciousness, contending with the need for considering the social alongside reformulations of the subject.