Heroic Moment - Prologue

Heroic Moment - Prologue initiates the idea with a board game set a half year ago and Heroic Moment concludes it with a mobile box that is supposed to encapsulate the game set, reflecting my on-going research and thinking on critical game theory, hero theory, and self-inquiry into my fluid childhood perception of “hero”.

Modified based on Senet, Heroic Moment - Prologue is a competitive board game between two players and requires the players to perform a specific finger gesture in order to play. It is created in 2022.


My childhood close friend and I came up with this finger gesture to satisfy our desire to play the role of something greater, cooler, wilder than who we are, and something that can be acted and interact with different environments yet still contains ourselves in it. Aging from 9 to 14, I put my bizarre fantasy drawn from East Asian cultural products into the self-directed theatre for myself being the only audience, imagery involving a hero, monster, God, dragon, landscape, architecture, my success and frustration in real life, and my imagination towards females. In these imagined plays, I enjoy the simultaneous sensations of playing the role of a hero, while looking at the person I am playing as a spectacle. My self-inquiry about this feeling led me to an ancient Egyptian board game called Senet, which provides a set of rules that enable similar kinds of interactions between two players and observers.