IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, WAI KEUNG-HUI DISCUSSES HIS PASSION FOR PHILOSOPHY, THE EXPRESSIVE VIOLENCE OF VIDEO GAMES, AND WHAT COMES AFTER SIMULATION.
Hong Kong-based artist Hui Wai-Keung (許維強) received his MFA from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong and a BFA in Sculpture from the Hong Kong Art School. Exhibiting internationally including throughout Asia and Europe, his interdisciplinary practice encompasses residencies abroad alongside curatorial work examining intersections of melancholy, myth and innovation in contemporary art. Currently focused on digital media and connecting art with the natural world, Hui believes in creativity's power to manifest alternative existential possibilities. Drawn to irrational terrains of dreams and pseudoscience, he mines the resonant space between the rational and mystical. Hui feels this liminal zone makes ripe terrain for reformulating the sublime uniquely suited to our technological moment. His exhibitions invite transcendental contemplation of simulated environments and virtual frontiers, new cosmologies coded into being.
Hui Wai-Keung’s RE-DÜRER: ARTIST, DEATH, AND THE DEVIL is featured in the GLITCH level of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.
This interview was produced by the students of the M.A. Program in Arts, Markets and Cultural Heritage at IULM University in Milan.
GVA: Can you briefly describe your education as an artist and curator?
Wai Keung-Hui: I was educated in both traditional and new media art schools. However, rather than hone craftsmanship in materials, my professors encouraged broadening conceptual knowledge. I spent days immersed in philosophers like Kant, Lacan and Heidegger — at times feeling enrolled in a philosophy program. Consequently, although still self-critical regarding technical facility, I'm grateful for increased cognitive agility developed through expansive interrogation of ideas themselves.
GVA: Can you name some influences - not necessarily artistic ones — that played a key role in your evolution as an artist?
Wai Keung-Hui: Beyond philosophical frameworks, mythologies, pseudoscience, ghost tales, gnostic thought, Buddhism, Haruki Murakami novels and sci-fi narratives across media (comics, film — especially The Matrix) also inspire my practice. Indeed I contend we already inhabit a matrix, our perceived reality more virtual than concrete. Lacking shamanic insight, art provides my sole portal to access these occluded realms, substantiating speculative truths through creative intercession.
Wai-Keung Hui, No Play Today, 2013
"It is project of performance art, which was run on the platform of multiplayer online game, “Anarchy Online”, in October 2005. The name of performer is “Alenila” – my avatar. The online game world is a public space. This is a public performance.
Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) is an environment in which players are used to fight, aim at equipping the most powerful weapons and armors, and become as stronger and richer as possible. Players somehow earn their social states during the time. In October 2005, Alenila on and on kept dancing in the Temple of the Three Winds dungeon in Anarchy Online. There is the most crowded battlefield where players are fighting fiercely. Dancing is definitely not supposed to be a normal behavior there. During the time of performance, I always received other players' queries. For example, someone asked me, “ehm, alenila what are you doing in totw? except for dancing i mean.”I also encountered another interesting response. A player came to dance with me.
This performance questioned the essence of “play” in the modern game. I wonder “play” might have the power to bring people to extraordinary. However, “play” in MMORPG at most time duplicates the ordinary social conventions and requests players to fit in. It just reinforces the framing of ordinary life. “Play” might lost its mysterious and precious characters nowadays." (Wai-Keung Hui)
GVA: When did you begin using video games in your practice? Why did you specifically choose a video game to make art? What do you find especially fascinating about this medium? Its interactivity? Agency? Aesthetics? Theatricality? Would you consider yourself a “gamer” as well?
Wai Keung-Hui: I was once an avid gamer, playing extensively as an adolescent — especially immersive MMORPGs. Back then I also believed virtual spaces like Second Life presaged humanity’s eventual migration online, our consciousness transcending physical limits through networked community. Keen to precipitate this new mode of being, I turned to art as transcendental conduit. Early internet artists like Eva and Franco Mattes provided initial inspiration for works seeking philosophical insight within natively digital media, though my Second Life performances lacked their mastery. Still committed to mining the ontology of virtuality, I danced endlessly amidst combat in Anarchy Online — pacifist foil to surrounding bloodlust.
In time my faith in online utopias faded, drawing me to other genres. Yet fascination with gaming and digital spaces has reignited from an analytic perspective. Rather than manifesting imaginative futures, I now anatomize video games scientifically and archeologically, reverse-engineering their construction through studying computer graphics — vertexes, polygons etc — then investigating attached logics and constraints. Still early in the learning process, I let the medium guide me, marveling at each layer revealed through meticulous dissection.
GVA: When/where did you first encounter machinima? What did/do you find interesting/fascinating about this artform? What is, in your opinion, the most significant machinima of all time, and why?
Wai Keung-Hui: Unfortunately I have limited exposure to machinima, so cannot adequately assess the form.
Wai Keung-Hui, Re-Dürer: Saint Artist in his Study (10 minutes excerpt), 2016
"This is a rework of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, Saint Jerome in his Study (1514). I am convinced that the ancient definitions of inspired melancholy from Pseudo-Aristotle was inscribed on Dürer’s three well-known engravings. Our melancholy, as well as our lives, are classified into three types (or stages): imagination, reason, and intellect. I rework the concepts based on my own interpretation and emotion. Instead of engraving, I hack a popular video game to generate graphics, and present them in three-channels video installation (or three separated video works). This one is belong to the third stage of inspired melancholy. It is about intellect, divine, religion, theology, and contemplation. I wish I could believe, but cannot help recognizing the virtuality and plasticity of the world. My ascetic dog of the senses never sleep peacefully." (Wai Keung-Hui)
GVA: Digital games often create parallel, alternative experiences for users. How do you relate to the complex relation between reality and simulation? How do you address this tension through your work?
Wai Keung-Hui: Video games do not simulate reality — even when developers intend experiential verisimilitude, invented realms emerge. I view these not as lesser representations but discrete realities obeying unique in-game physics. Our perceived reality also lacks concrete authority, merely comprising one conceptual dimension among many: new spaces perpetually unfold. “Simulation” remains an illusion — perhaps the constraints and mechanisms of game construction spawn the most compelling departures from daily life. A Grand Theft Auto pistol feels wholly alien to its real-world counterpart. And virtually passing through Eva and Franco Mattes' nude forms in Second Life resonates differently than encountering the physical bodies of Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s. Yet provocative echoes between domains also inspire audiences. I believe artists can either amplify or rupture the membrane between real and virtual through subtractive interventions. In my video installation Re-Dürer, I heighten permitted violence in games alongside avatars’ endless cycles of death and rebirth - highlighting symbolic departures from mortal existence. When considering liminal spaces gaming opens, I immediately recall Harun Farocki’s Parallel series contrasting early virtual environments with heightened photorealism in later platforms. The exponential technical evolution distills gaming’s power to access alternative existential possibilities.
GVA: What’s your take on the paradoxical nature of machinima, a form greatly constrained by commercial copyright despite using commercial platforms as raw material?
Wai Keung-Hui: Contrasted with the creative freedom of video games, mundane real-world legal structures seem nonsensical constraints divorced from artistic goals or values — copyright regimen being one glaring example.
Wai Keung-Hui, Re-Dürer: Melencolia I (outdated modern version), 2016
"This is a rework of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, Melencolia I (1514). I am convinced that the ancient definitions of inspired melancholy from Pseudo-Aristotle was inscribed on Dürer’s three well-known engravings. Our melancholy, as well as our lives, are classified into three types (or stages): imagination, reason, and intellect. I rework the concepts based on my own interpretation and emotion. Instead of engraving, I hack a popular video game to generate graphics, and present them in three-channels video installation (or three separated video works). This one is belong to the first stage of inspired melancholy. It is about imagination, art, craft, and creativity. Geometry played crucial and mysterious part in Dürer’s engraving. It enclosed some transcendental truth. I extend it into the version in modern era, try to ascend myself into the fourth dimension." (Wai Keung-Hui)
GVA: Would you agree that machinima has democratized the art making process? Has it lowered barriers for aspiring video artists?
Wai Keung-Hui: Having researched neither form extensively, I hesitate to situate machinima subordinate to video art - they strike me as wholly discrete media generating distinct creative realities, each with unique contours and constraints. After Duchamp, should artistic barriers still concern us?
GVA: How do video game aesthetics affect the overall impact of your work? What comes first, concept or medium?
Wai Keung-Hui: As a newcomer still probing this space, medium precedes message thus far - I manipulate algorithms and marvel at unpredictable visual responses. Hoping to impose conceptual frameworks, I instead discover the platform’s native effects wield their own persuasive power. When tweaking polygon coordinates expecting anthropomorphic distortions, sudden chromatic transformations proved more startling. I let gaming systems guide my work until their capabilities and proclivities come into focus.
Wai Keung-Hui, Transcendence, 2016
“This series of works tries to transcend an ordinary three-dimensional model to the four-dimension mathematically, and projects back to a three-dimensional appearance. There are many possible solutions of projection, at the same time; there are also many possible four-dimensional models which can project the same appearance. Thus, I wonder, our living world is just one of the many possible appearances, projected from many possible hyperspaces. This idea is inspired by Professor Linda Henderson’s research on fourth dimension geometry on modern art, and I would like to imitate and continue the works of those masters such as Duchamp, Metzinger, and Malevich.” (Wai Keung-Hui)