Spiritual Play: The Crusades
2023
multi-media installation
Spiritual Play: The Crusades is a
multimedia installation that combines cartography, collections of badges,soundscape, text pieces, and kinetic
sculpture, with an intense focus on videogame and its spiritual dimensions. Referring to the Crusades, a spiritually driven military pilgrimage, a conquest to
the religiously different other, this project invites the audiences to play the role of a pilgrim. While
telling this story about the journey of pilgrimage to themselves, they become
the other as opposed to their identityin reality, and experience spirituality in
games without becoming a believer of specific religion. Built on Johan Huizinga’s articulation of war as a form of play, the ludic
identity construction theory from Playful Identities, and Stef Aupers’ spiritual
play theory, the project examines these theories in practice. This project is
fueled by my interest in the video game Europa Universalis IV and the Crusades King V,
games that prominently feature map as projections of players’ desire to conquer. Similarly, my project began as a mapping endeavor to provide the
instruments for playful readings and fantasizing.
The first map I made was Antioch City Plan. This map is part of a greater cartographic endeavor to map all the strategically and relighiously significant cities during the Crusades, and their surrounding topography. I began by training myself to be a soviet Union military cartographer, and simultaneously explore the specifc way they encode human-inhabited space, to contemplate the topics of war, spirituality, nationlism, knowledge system, and fictional narratives.



Man Who Conquered The World From His Apartment
2023
Algorithm, posters, board game set, bed set, binoculars, pizza, waste tin can, ladder, iPad, printer
This installation reveals the room of a man who conquered the world in a war simulation game using the machine he invented. He grew up under a collectivism, and patriarchal education and was surrounded by the grand narrative imposed by the media and the Chinese government. As an idealist, he believes in the value of the dream of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and sees it as the only way to self-accomplishment. Pressured by the gap between the great dream and his poverty-stricken reality, he was eventually driven insane to realize this dream.
Perceiving the world map as a representation of political powers, this man developed an artificial intelligence program that turns anything it sees into a map for the game of conquest called RISK. While the machine operates based on a graphic matching algorithm and a printer, it matches color areas and objects in the input images with the reality and game world region’s shape in the dataset.

The Ant and The Grasshopper
2022
3D printed grasshopper head, found clothing, found pickaxe,
silicone skin, concrete, wires, gold bar, quarry stone, diamond, petroleum,
trading card(lumber, coal, marble)
This piece attempts to define the word
“play” and confront the accompanying anxiety concerning the ideal of existence
for society and individuals. The installation depicts a resident of an imagined
utopia; a utopia theorized by Bernard Suits in 1978, in which all needs for
instrumental and productivity are satisfied, and the only thing left for humans
to do is to play games. When games are fabricated and made-believe as all the
activity used to be driven by economic needs and social growth, the distinction
between labor and game becomes inexplicit and even interchangeable.
The grasshopper in this project refers to
the one in the story of The Ant and the Grasshopper by Aesop, yet presents
another interpretation. Instead of being lazy and shortsighted, this
grasshopper resembles someone in disguise playing a game without knowing it,
who therefore believe game playing to be the essential life of the grasshopper.

Heroic Moment - Prologue
2022
Instruction, Silicone, Hydro Stone, Rigid Urethane, Packaging Bubbles, Prints, Dice, Game Table, Tablecloth, MDF wood
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.

Puh, puh, puh. Puh, puh.
2022 | Mercury, Neon, Glass Tube, Recorded sound of my girlfriend and me, 276 Lines of Code
“There are times when me and her were both
sitting there, growing bored of what we just did, one of us started to make
this nonverbal sound. The other was annoyed and decided to fight back by making
even more noises. Within a short time, confrontational becomes harmonious when
we were able to communicate beyond gesture and language, of our feelings and
tendings.” Says the artist.

Still My Heart Longs For You
2022 | Mechanical Composition, Pasta Mcahine, Staws, Rubber Ice, Bar Table, Glass Container, Metal, MDF Wood, Motors
This piece is about romance, about love, and about struggles in love. More precisely, it is about nervousness, insecurity, and not knowing what to do in the first date with first love, as well as what comes after, the furiousness, the misery, the euphoria, and the life.

Wind, Prairie Dropseed, Pollinator
2021
Pollens, modified kite, scent, bamboo box, instruction sheet
Wind, Prairie Dropseed, Pollinator is a game set contained in a box. It invites players to fly a kite with thin layers of prairie dropseed’s pollens attached and to take part in the pollination process of the plants. Prairie dropseed is a grass specie native to Illinois, and it used to constitute the primary source of Illinois smell-scape(landscape of smell) before human agriculture and industry take place. The childlike vitality flow through the actions of flying a kite, while the overwhelming smellscape of prairie dropseed suggest the presence of the long-existed prairie landscape in the past as if it is still present. Empathy between the plants and players are also aroused.

Soaring
2021
14 varied paper airplanes, 14 scents, instruction sheets, clear plastic bags, clear acrylic
Soaring is an instructional kit stored in an acrylic box comprising 14 paper airplanes applied with different scents in different colors and shapes, and an instruction sheet. Players are invited to take the airplanes outdoor and fly the airplane following a 4-step instruction which requires actions of smelling, throwing, running, and hearing. The instruction for different airplanes varies in the second step based primarily on the scents that highlight central elements in various natural landscapes. Soaring transforms the natural environment into a playground and the human body into an object for play. Throughout the process, a unique and personal attachment to the natural landscape is created with uniform guidelines. As paper airplanes take off from hands, players’ minds take off and soar by imagination.

Running Bunny
2021
9 air circulators, plastic fabrics, wires, cardboard, power cord
Inspired by flying plastic bags on the street, Running Bunny sents out an invitation to wander and pet. While the adorable bunnies run restlessly, disquiet feeling gradually pervade over time. Buzzing fans, plastic sensations, and crowded bunnies constitute an imagining scenario which confuse individual’s orientation within a larger collective and speak to a specific East-Asian city sentiment related to the artist’s personal history.
