Natural Causes: The Deaths and Afterlives of Art at the Digital Precipice

Hong Kong has long been reputed as a city of endless urban development, simultaneously maintaining various heritage sites, and promoting building renewal schemes. If on the surface, this cultivates nostalgic reminiscences about its lauded skyline, it is when surveying the city streetside, that many of its buildings reveal themselves to be under construction, shrouded in makeshift cloaks of netting draped on top of hand-assembled bamboo scaffolding. While masking requisite repairs, they appear overall, as provisional monuments to a region in perpetual metamorphosis. 

Closer inspection also reveals remnants of the past, from Chinese antiques of known and dubious origin found within districts like Sheung Wan to the various goods scattered among the jumble of shops, street hawkers and ‘night markets’ in and around Sham Shui Po. Today, this district, located within Hong Kong’s Kowloon Peninsula, north of the city’s famed Victoria Harbour and ‘island side’, shows signs of gentrifying, while retaining much of what’s been dubbed as its ‘entrepreneurial maker spirit’. As author Janice Chen writes:  

First developed in the late 19th century, just before the British leased the New Territories in 1898, Sham Shui Po was transformed by waves of immigration after World War II, when refugees fleeing the Chinese Civil War settled in the area [and] with the people came industry. […] By the 2000s, however, nearly all manufacturing had been outsourced to factories in mainland China, and Sham Shui Po came to be dominated by wholesale outlets that connected those factories to buyers from around the world. Now even those businesses are disappearing. In their place is a new wave of artists, designers and entrepreneurs who are setting up shop.⁰¹

In short, any remaining traces of Sham Shui Po’s historical legacy as an electronics hub, along with the city’s remaining widespread, tech gadget-focussed malls and storefronts, hearken back to Hong Kong’s heyday as an exporter of homemade goods beginning in the late 1970s. Although the manufacturing of electronics has mostly migrated to neighbouring cities on the mainland, a stroll to the shops in Hong Kong still reveals some of this obsolete digital equipment among all manner of new tech and their accessories, alongside the shopkeepers and sometime repairers who are engulfed within these environs.  

These retail treasure troves are not unlike the early mainframes and current super computational systems which still fill entire rooms, albeit mostly hidden within large data storage facilities.⁰² This fact is not lost on artists who lay claim to a tangible sense of reality by incorporating the technological apparatus itself as a material component in their work rather than just as a useful tool for its creation. The results can be found among a recent spate of exhibitions, art fairs and collections in Hong Kong and its surrounding region.

These include the mixed media installation, Ventriloquists’ Stone (幻石) (2023) by Nadim Abbas whose show at Oi! spanned several rooms of the historic art space.⁰³ Even before entering the exhibition site, visitors came across several sculptural components – a freestanding, arched wall with an inset speaker, along with several stone cubes lying outside on the building grounds. These same elements were echoed inside where brick walls with semicircular openings evoked cavern-like grottos, along with more of the same stone cubes and mounds of sand in repeated pattern configurations on the floor. The entire scene, steeped in blue light and enlivened by background noise, also included monitors with simulcast views of different parts of the installation and a band of performers donning white caps, masks, and gloves as uniforms, walking in and out of truncated doors and running on treadmills scattered throughout the site.

However fantastical, Ventriloquists’ Stone (幻石) is also familiar, being reminiscent of the artist’s past works such as Afternoon in Utopia (2012) and The Last Vehicle (2016), in which Abbas applied the same classic Chinese building techniques by using moulds to form similar sand piles. These, in turn, were patterned to resemble the ‘hostile architecture’ used in building sites to deter loitering; essentially serving as street code for ‘KEEP OUT’ and ‘OFF’. Abbas’s site-conscious, multidisciplinary installations are nevertheless consistently and experientially off-kilter, placing visitors ‘between a rock and a hard place’. As the artist concedes: ‘It is an exercise in misdirection and misplacement, a secret in plain view, a crucible of ruin and regeneration, a porous theatre of cohabitation [which] equates, with a wilful disregard for our everyday sense of scale, urban building typologies with circuit board components.’⁰⁴ Coupled with the performers present in many of his works who through their costume, movement and pacing, simultaneously exist ‘in the moment’ while being strangely ‘out of time’, Abbas’s work may be perceived as an indicator of our own digitally enhanced state of fractured in-betweenness.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          This is reiterated sonically: in this case, through Abbas’s reference to ventriloquism. As an act of stagecraft in which a person speaks through a surrogate figure, thereby animating it with humanistic properties, Abbas uses this trope to infer how a ‘thrown voice’ also serves as a subjective marker for feeling displaced. Essentially, he expresses a sense of dislocation by insinuating that the clusters of stones and sand piles reference Chinese scholars’ rocks (gongshi, 供石) and by extension, within the installation a surreal version of a Chinese rock garden. It is a reminder of how artists still use material forms to embed knowledge and confer meaning. Although given the temporal nature of having some sand piles trampled by the performers, and as the exhibition inevitably ends, these also hint at how the significance of any moment, just as the art which reflects it, can change irrevocably. In his own assessment, Abbas writes:

With ventriloquism, there is this voice that is projected from one object, or one being to another. [In] that change of place […] there is always this connection with time. So, you might say what I’m trying to do is to think of this show as if I was a time traveller. To show somebody, fifty or seventy years ago, at a time when computers were not common, and we didn’t live in this kind of reality. To show someone from back in time what it feels like to live in the world we live in today, using technology that existed half a century ago to show what the future is like.⁰⁵

Creating environments using Hong Kong as a backdrop has yielded many cultural milestones, famously in cinema through the back catalogue of films directed by Wong Kar Wai. Hong Kong has also populated other ‘screens’ through its frequent representation within a multiplicity of video game experiences over the past 30 years. This was noted by artist and educator Hugh Davies, who has observed through his research and writing ‘the city’s character, architecture, and urban design as represented[…] in its varying incarnations, unearthing the correspondence between the actual and virtual.’⁰⁶     

This holds true for the burgeoning oeuvre of Andrew Luk. His collaboration with fellow Hong Kong-based artist Samuel Swope on Ready\Set\Fulfill (2021), effectively transformed DE SARTHE gallery into a twenty-first-century ‘games room’, turning their former Wong Chuk Hang district industrial space into a first-person-view (FPV) drone racecourse.⁰⁷ Filled with an array of monitors, LED strip lighting, a dry ice machine, and other ‘raw materials’, the installation belied an obvious debt to the electronics heritage of Hong Kong, as the items used to assemble various art pieces doubled as obstacles, tunnels and viewing stations from which the course and any action stemming from it could be observed. Furthermore, the course when activated turned players into performers as Ready\Set\Fulfill did not merely draw from the surface aesthetics of digital technology, but provided an immersive environment in which each participant could serve as both competitor and visitor to enact their subjective potential through social interaction.

For Luk’s part, the focus on drones in Ready\Set\Fulfill extends his exploration of technological apparatuses associated with militaristic applications, such as his earlier use of homemade napalm as surface treatment for Horizon Scan, the artist’s series of two-dimensional, textured wall works (completed in 2018) which resemble aerial views of welcome or hostile terrain. Luk likewise explores the complications around territorial land shifts through the experience of art and gaming in Autosave: Redoubt (2018). Alongside collaborators Alexis Mailles and Peter Nelson – the latter having himself investigated technological applications towards sustainable and ecological ends – the trio reimagined the computer game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive⁰⁸ by inserting a decommissioned World War Two bunker in Hong Kong as the visual source for their version of the course. The bunker, as one among multiple prior defence structures along the so-called ‘Battlefield Trail’,⁰⁹ is ostensibly reinvigorated by the artists who offer narratives playing up and not down, the implications of real-world combat and their devastating effects. 

Guangzhou-born, New York- and Beijing-based artist Lin Yilin conducted a similar experiment through his collaboration with Nonny de la Peña for Passage: The Life of a Wall on Lin He Road (2017). Their 90-minute VR experience recreates Lin’s seminal 1995 ‘action’ Safely Manoeuvring across Lin He Road, when he moved concrete bricks to form a temporary wall across a busy freeway in mainland Guangzhou, thus allowing VR participants the opportunity to approximate the physical experience of Lin himself years back, laboriously if effectively disturbing the peace against urban redevelopment. Significantly aiding Lin for the ‘sequel’ was his collaborator, Nonny de la Peña who founded Emblematic Group in 2007, and whose pioneering technology combining VR graphics with audio associated with real-world events generates a kind of ‘immersive journalism’ informed by her background in broadcasting and documentary film-making.¹⁰

More recently, art made through AI and as NFTs (non-fungible tokens) resonates with conceptual art’s move towards dematerialisation in the 1960s. To observe these tectonic shifts through a regional lens over the last six decades, however, shows how many artists insist on an approach which employs both material as well as immaterial technology, thus making – visible and audible – art which is still rooted in IRL encounters. If artists today continue to cultivate what Michael Fried once theorised, albeit as a critique of Minimalism for being ‘theatrical’, then this now extends to the digital arena whereby interactions between art and audience are filtered through selfies and social media. Here, it is through the implementation of real-world aesthetics and storytelling within the ‘exposed’ technology, that these artists and their collaborators instil empathy within the destroy-or-be-destroyed mentality of generic gaming, thus turning mindless play into an experiential field of mindful (inter)action including for those engaging with their work.

The ability to create a sense of place is in part embedded within the history of the place itself, as Hong Kong duo Zheng Mahler, comprising artist Royce Ng and anthropologist Daisy Bisenieks exemplify. Teetering between past, present and future, their works combine low-cost material goods, pseudo-heritage artefacts and seemingly immaterial technologies. For instance, in The Master Algorithm (2019) cheap fans are used to present holographic imagery, while in the installation Mountains of Gold and Silver are not as Good as Mountains of Blue and Green (2020) Asian ceramic objects like vases and plates serve as shorthand for cultural heritage, and their surrogates.  

Merging Chinese traditions (and their superstitions) with new technological systems, also finds its way into elements of Luk and Swope’s drone racecourse. For example, their so-named Dragon Cloud Gate appears as if it were part homage to Duchamp’s Large Glass, part isolated building window propped up on a set of standard issue office chairs. Awash in dry ice with part of the glass cut out to aid the flow of drones moving along the course, it also forms what artist and art historian Emily Verla Bovino calls, ‘a micro-scale model of the “dragon gate” gaps found in Hong Kong’s luxury high-rises, ascribed geomantic significance for enabling spirit dragons to pass from mountains to sea.’ By incorporating feng shui principles as much as those of art and tech, Ready\Set\Fulfill ‘refuses dichotomies but not difference,’ Bovino continues, noting the artist duo resists presenting drones as ‘dystopian fantasies, [rather] as evolutionary accelerators in an ecosystem where nature remains the ultimate technology.’¹¹

Beyond the city’s world-renowned high rises, some of which literally beam owing to lighting elements embedded within their building infrastructure, are clear attempts to merge the technological with the cosmological while using Hong Kong to set the scene. For example, the M+ Museum utilises an entire exterior side of its facility for digital commissions, launching with Hong Kong artist Ellen Pau (co-founder of Videotage, the city’s first moving-image media non-profit), who created The Shape of Light (2022) comprising of a towering figure beaming while beckoning like a lighthouse across the waters off Victoria Harbour. According to Silke Schmickl, Chanel Lead Curator of Moving Image, the M+ Facade – alongside robust exhibition, programming and conservation efforts – is intended to breed ‘new ways of how cinema can appear on the screen’ for audiences outside as much as inside the museum.¹²

Additionally, Schmickl and others are looking for new ways of addressing the ongoing museological and archival conundrum of maintaining technology in art, such as when artworks’ components become obsolete, thus necessitating advanced (or ingenious at least) approaches to connoisseurship for their upkeep. Certainly, before the need to maintain algorithms as art, precedents existed in the field of moving image media, notably through carers with protracted histories of contextualising art within digital, technological and virtual fields.¹³ This extends to artists who remain consistent, and consistently relevant in their approach to making art over the years, even as digital technology evolves around them. For example, South Korean Lee Bul’s prescient Cyborg sculpture series (1997–2011) evidences the artist’s long-standing practice of rendering visible, and visceral, the possible effects of technology on the human body as a singular and collective entity. This exploration continues in Lee’s performances, installations, sculptures, and most recently, in temporary monuments such as her current Long Tail Halo (2024) Facade Commission outside of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In looking back at artist-created, digitally influenced immersive environments, it is worthwhile to consider the work of New York-based artist Jon Kessler who has long conjured ‘one man’s rubbish may be another’s treasure’ scenarios.¹⁴ In his case, this manifests through mounting memorable mechanistic-oriented assemblages, from small-scale sculptures to room-filled installations. As advanced technology has for the most part outpaced art, artists have necessarily sourced outdated or obsolete media in making new work. This ‘tech-thrift’ approach has spanned more than four decades of Kessler’s practice, allowing him to explore ‘the connection between bodily movement and technical apparatus, often deploying mechanisms and video to facilitate this relationship’, as evidenced in ‘Datumsoria’ (2019), his first exhibition in East Asia at Shanghai’s media art-focussed Chronus Art Center alongside Hangzhou artist Yan Lei.¹⁵ This follows Kessler’s seminal, tent-like, room-sized structure The Web (2013) exhibited at the former street-level premises of the Swiss Institute in New York.¹⁶ Replete with computer monitors and their cardboard containers, the entire structure monumentalised the overflow of capitalist goods, while incorporating knitting machines to hint at their production, as well as the origin story behind pixel-based technology.¹⁷Swathed in blue netting, this was undoubtedly meant to evoke all things ‘.Net’-related: 

Much like the Internet itself, The Web acts as both a sentient organism and an environmental space: it facilitates the internal circuit between viewer, camera, and monitor, while simultaneously doubling as a sprawling architectural structure. While The Web conceptually foregrounds the role of networked technologies and our dependence on them, it is in many ways a tribute to direct experience. The viewer of The Web is repositioned among fellow viewers, with the feeling of sensory dislocation condensed into one geographic location – the exhibition space – and recast as a form of shared collective immersion.¹⁸

Kessler’s focus on large-scale installations has lately mutated into more modestly scaled kinetic sculptures. Among them, Ikebana #6 (2019) and A Horse and 2 Fishermen Walk into a Bar (2014), in metal and incorporating found ceramics, can perhaps be read as an ode to once priceless seventeenth-century Silk Road trade-era porcelain. Other sculptures are embedded with newer technologically driven devices, such as ring lights that stand in for the sun, or various cameras which pan back and forth by way of jittery motors that record the works themselves.¹⁹ Beneath their whirl and chime, Kessler insists on his art being observed with both wonder and dread. His kinetic sculptures, for example, are light in form, if laden by insinuation, to the ongoing recovery and reattribution efforts around cultural heritage objects which have been buried, misplaced or misappropriated along the way. Elsewhere, in one section of The Web, there is netting visible on the exterior of a wooden shed structure. Only this time, any pun equating its mesh netting with the Internet is no joke: instead, it stands in sympathy to those producing the world’s technology, fast fashion and the like as the real-world equivalent are of nets that have been used to prevent workers from falling to their deaths.

Exposing what goes on inside of the factories generating worldwide consumer products, finds its way into the early work of Beijing artist Cao Fei, too. Her portrait series Whose Utopia (2006) immortalised workers cosplaying their dream careers against a backdrop of their real and relentless day jobs. The artist has also played gamer via her avatar ‘China Tracy’ standing in for urban planners, architects, constructors and as a dweller herself to build and inhabit RMB City (2007–11) within the online platform Second Life. The fictional city came alive through the artist and other participants merging real-world infrastructures with virtual ones. Since then, artists have added more layers and personalised their approaches to world building such as Cao’s fellow Beijing-born, now Tokyo-based artist Lu Yang who incorporates himself through live motion capture in livestream performances staged alongside simultaneous, virtual experiences.

These works and more, beg the question: as our lives continue to be subsumed by technology, what does any form of ‘museum standard’ condition – whether in a white cube or black box – matter if tech is neutralising any capacity for containment? This is not for the lack of trying, lest we forget the long line of seminal exhibitions, online platforms, media art collections and conservation efforts to this end. In Hong Kong, these include ongoing time-based, programmatic and commercial offerings, from the annual Microwave International New Media Arts Festival (begun 1996) to the more recent Digital Art Fair (begun 2021).²⁰

Historically, the moments preceding the end of various art movements have always been fraught. Whether or not artists had knowledge of this taking place, their art proved seminal in retrospect by anticipating, and then representing, changing times. In this vein, can one equivocate dying from ‘natural causes’ owing to illness caused by internal body complications, rather than external forces, as an applicable framework in considering the evolving nature of art today? And, if contemporary art is ‘of our time’, is there a scenario when it will be ‘out of time’? In continuing to use art as a gauge for tracking the metamorphosing conditions of the world at large, which these days is increasingly shaped by digital forces, how much does an artist’s work which incorporates technology mirror the cycle of its source material – such as when using the latest iteration of this or that tech product also signals the depreciation, even death of its predecessors? 

Viewed this way, art may be seen as a form of monument to fading technologies, which, with its intended immortality, musters enough energy to endure (despite) time. But in their inherent homage to the passing of the person for whom they were created, or the subject they are heralding, monuments expose the fugitive nature of capture and an inevitable denouement which demands reassessment as to its effective representation over time. 

Returning to Hong Kong’s electronics heritage and how this continues to manifest today in artistic production, regardless of media, these artists’ works may be conceived as monuments simultaneously foretelling their own eventual obsolescence. For as computer programmer Ellen Ullman predicts, there are fault lines, even within the ever-advancing digital field: 

Every system has a bug. The more complex the system, the more the bugs. Transactions circling the earth, passing through the computer systems, of tens or hundreds of corporate entities, thousands of network switches, millions of lines of code, trillions of integrated circuit logic gates. Somewhere there is a fault. Sometime the fault will be activated. Now or next year, sooner or later, by design, by hack, or by onslaught of complexity. It doesn’t matter. One day someone will install ten lines of assembler code, and it will all come down. ²¹

Art and its movements give rise, then give way to what comes next, while simultaneously being repackaged through collections and surveyed in publishing, or as their various degrees of ‘authenticity’ are being determined by scientific and forensically driven approaches to conservation – a second death but also an afterlife, if you will, occurs following the literal or philosophical ‘death of the artist’.²² So, the inevitability of ever-new digital futures is not necessarily the death knell for modes of artistic practice. Taking as one example, the nuanced sense of creative reflection elaborated on by artists working today in Hong Kong and across the region, come possible alternatives which insist on consciousness to sentience, if not as a permanent solution, then as a temporary salve.