EVENT: POYUAN JUAN (JUNE 6—19 2025)

Intrusion

digital video (3840 x 2160), color, sound, 15’ 42” seconds, 2021, Taiwan

created by Poyuan Juan

Intrusion draws upon the server migration incident that occurred between 2007 and 2011, when a large number of Chinese World of Warcraft players relocated to Taiwan servers following regulatory conflicts and censorship in mainland China. The video work reimagines this episode through the visual logic of the game itself: character models, rendered en masse, are subjected to simulated clustering algorithms and move in erratic, involuntary spasms, gesturing toward the violence of digital displacement and network congestion. Using stripped-down aesthetics — geometric primitives, textureless surfaces, and graphical glitches — the piece constructs a barren, destabilized environment suggestive of a digital ruin: a deserted server, abandoned infrastructure, a space left behind in cyberspace. At its core, Intrusion is a reflection on digital geography and geopolitical frictions. The migration to the Taiwan servers, prompted by stalled updates and censorship in China, resulted in login delays, overcrowding, and a degradation of the in-game experience. It also brought political tensions to the fore, with simplified Chinese characters dominating chat channels, gold-farming operations disrupting gameplay, and cross-strait hostilities surfacing in virtual space. By re-staging this moment, Intrusion contemplates the porous boundary between virtual architecture and real-world conflict, and how digital platforms unwittingly become zones of political entanglement.

Poyuan Juan is a Taipei-based artist whose work investigates the cultural afterlives of digital platforms, with a focus on online games, virtual environments, and the aesthetics of technological obsolescence. His solo exhibitions include presentations at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei Digital Art Center, and Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts. His work has also been featured internationally at the Athens Digital Arts Festival, Videotage (Hong Kong), videoclub (UK), the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, and the Milan Machinima Festival, where his War Game Map and Sino-French War was shown in 2022. Juan’s practice operates at the intersection of digital archaeology and new media art, tracing the residues of networked interaction and interrogating the material conditions of virtual experience. Drawing on his background in visual arts and his immersion in post-internet culture, he integrates machinima, game engines, and 3D imaging tools to create time-based works that explore cyberqueer narratives, online communities, and the collapsing boundary between simulation and memory. His work asks what remains when virtual worlds decay, and how histories unfold within algorithmic architectures.

EVENT: HOU LAM TSUI (FEBRUARY 14—27 2025)

Rabu Rabu

digital video, colour, sound, 18’ 18”, 2024, Hong Kong

created by Hou Lam Tsui

Rabu Rabu (meaning lovey-dovey in Japanese) reimagines and subverts the conventions of Japanese dating simulation games, known for their focus on interactions with attractive young female characters. Instead, it presents a fictional scenario where the traditional trajectory of falling in love and winning over the protagonist is no longer an option. Drawing on Eva Illouz’s The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations, which describes ‘unloving’ as a narrative without a clear structure, Rabu Rabu reflects on agency both within and beyond the screen. By intertwining digital and physical AFK (Away From Keyboard) worlds, the work examines life in a heteronormative society shaped by late capitalism and dissolves the boundaries between game and video.

Hou Lam Tsui (b. 1997) is an artist who works across moving image, sculpture, installation, and text. Her practice centres around personal experience, affect, gender politics, and peripheral storytelling. Tsui rethinks how femininity and queerness are imagined within cultures, critically exploring how media and consumer desires shape emotions, our notion of love, femininity, and identities by drawing inspiration from pop culture, advertisement, anime, literature and beyond.  Her work has been previously exhibited and screened at ACMI (Australia), Art Basel Films (Hong Kong), Beijing International Short Film Festival (China), Guangdong Times Museum (China), Para Site (Hong Kong), Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong), among others. Selected recent exhibitions include Follow the Feeling(Guangdong Times Museum, 2024), One is not born a woman (Square Street Gallery, 2023), Post-Human Narratives—In the Name of Scientific Witchery (Para Site; Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, 2022). She is a recipient of the WMA Graduate Award (2024), the Liu Shiming Art Foundation Scholarship (2024), and Para Site’s 2046 Fermentation + Fellowships (2022). Tsui lives and works in Hong Kong. She received a BA in Fine Art and History of Art from the University of Leeds in 2018 and later obtained an MFA from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2024.

EVENT: NATALIE MAXIMOVA (JANUARY 31—FEBRUARY 13 2025)

Awaiting Oblivion

digital video, colour, sound, 20’ 23”, 2024, Russia

created by Natalie Maximova

World premiere

Awaiting Oblivion interrogates the collapse of simulated reality in The Last of Us Part II, uncovering spaces where the boundaries between representation and existence dissolve. As the digital world fractures into glitches and voids, it exposes the instability of meaning, unmasking the illusion of coherence, and confronting observers with absence that lies at the heart of perception. Maximova uses the embedded photo mode functions as a critical apparatus, transforming observation into an active engagement with the ungraspable. The poetic structure of her voice over amplifies the dissonance between digital precision and the fluid, ephemeral quality of ecological and philosophical questions, echoing the tensions between order and chaos in post-humanist discourse.

Natalie Maximova is an interdisciplinary artist and photographer based in London UK. She holds a Master’s degree from the ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne and has also studied at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. Maximova’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including Now Play This festival, Sickhoes #6 imitate - manipulate – simulate at Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Milan Machinima Festival (VRAL), the 6th and 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Balagan!!! in Kühlhaus Berlin and others. Her work has been featured in various publications including Spectator, Il Giornale dell’Arte, Camera Austria, Bird in Flight, Calvert Journal, and Vice among others. She has also contributed to Screen Images In-Game Photography, Screenshot, Screencast, edited by Winfried Gerling, Sebastian Möring and Marco De Mutiis and published by Kulturverlag Kadmos in 2023.

EVENT: HARRISON WADE REISHMAN (JANUARY 17—30 2025, ONLINE)

Ida B. Wells: A Red Record

digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 39’ 34”, 2020, United States of America

created by Harrison Wade Reishman

Ida B. Wells: A Red Record is a biographical machinima that examines the life and contributions of Ida B. Wells, a trailblazing African American journalist and activist. Conceived during the Covid-19 lockdown through the innovative use of the Red Dead Redemption 2 game engine, the film transforms Wells’ seminal investigative journalism into a sophisticated cinematic narrative. By leveraging the intricate virtual environments of the game and employing a nuanced narration, the film reconstructs Wells’ relentless documentation of lynching atrocities in the American South during the 1890s, drawing extensively from her landmark publication, The Red Record. The production combines historical accuracy with the creative latitude afforded by video game aesthetics, deploying almost thirty characters to re-enact pivotal moments of Wells’ life. 

Hailing from Hurricane, West Virginia, Harrison Wade Reishman is an accomplished filmmaker and innovator in machinima whose work explores the confluence of traditional cinema and game-driven narratives. A graduate of the University of Virginia with dual degrees in Psychology and Marketing, Reishman combines narrative sophistication with technical expertise in his visual storytelling. His career trajectory includes roles as a UTA agent trainee and a television development executive at Entertainment One, where he contributed to acclaimed productions such as Hung (HBO) and Hell on Wheels (AMC). Transitioning to independent filmmaking, he received a Taliesin Nexus grant in 2018 to direct Crosswinds, and has since directed and produced a series of critically recognized short films. Currently based in Los Angeles, Reishman continues to push the boundaries of machinima as a transformative medium for storytelling.

EVENT: ANDY HUGHES (JANUARY 3—16 2025, ONLINE)

Shimmer

digital video, color, sound, 11’, 2024, United Kingdom

created by Andy Hughes

Shimmer creatively combines photographic assemblage, archival footage, and video game imagery, to interrogate the vitality and agency of materials, positioning pollution and climate change as pivotal concerns while destabilizing the dichotomy between animate and ostensibly inert matter such as “plastics”.

Andy Hughes is a British artist whose practice centers on the littoral zone and the politics of plastic waste, with a significant focus on machinima as a medium to explore the ecological and philosophical implications of pollution, materiality, and human-environment relationships. Hughes studied fine art at Cardiff University and received a scholarship to study photography at the Royal College of Art, London. He was the first artist in residence at Tate Gallery St. Ives. For more than thirty years, he has collaborated with scientists, curators, publishers, NGOs, academics, other artists, and many communities sympathetic to those aiming to examine and consider our relationships with plastic and pollution-related matters. Recent work aims to transcend the conventional trope of “raising awareness” about plastic pollution, instead utilizing machinima as a tool to explore the intersections of weirdness, magic, and Timothy Morton’s philosophical concepts. Through this medium, Hughes reconfigures ecological narratives, positioning them within a broader ontological and speculative framework.