Video Art
Reading the Room
In the age of AI, the ability to read between the lines has become a contest between human intuition and algorithmic logic. Borrowing its title from a pivotal moment in Jiang Yifan’s animated video work One Sunday Morning (2021), ‘Reading the Room’ explores how AI and emergent linguistic forms are redefining our notions of “home”, social bonds, and the fluid nature of truth in the context of relocation.
Today, moving images function as “distorting mirrors”, like fun-house reflections that form new collective experiences between observers and the observed. We are entering a state of “Techgnosis”—a continuous becoming in which generative technologies fuse disparate spaces into new, visible realities. As the mage Serie from the Japanese manga series Frieren (2020– ) suggests, “In the world of magic, what is unimaginable cannot be realised.” AI training gives form to our collective unconscious, merging the scientific with the arcane and dissolving the boundaries between the virtual and the actual.
As algorithms erode the line between the niche and the mainstream, the weird and the banal now collide with increasing frequency, unsettling our sense of place. Much like the characters in Jiang’s moving-image work, whose thoughts materialise as floating bubbles, this selection traces the whimsical sparks that surface in algorithmic gaps—moments of epiphany, delay, and misjudgment that reveal the layered empathies of our digital existence.
Zoie Yung
Curator
Liang-Jung Chen (b. Taipei)
UK Indefinite Leave to Remain Application Fee, 2025
Single-channel video
06’00”
UK Indefinite Leave to Remain Application Fee (2025) is a screen-recorded performance on YouTube that doubles as a live fundraising campaign. In utilising the platform to solicit public donations, Chen reconfigures the familiar interface of a Google Sheet into a site of resilience, meticulously archiving her exhaustive efforts to secure the substantial legal fees required for UK permanent residency. Through accelerated screen recording, she converts the chromatic logic of a colour-coded spreadsheet into a frenetic kinetic animation.
This zero-cost production strategy mirrors the economic precarity that the work lays bare, drawing on contemporary vlogging cultures—specifically the “cost of living” genre, in which creators transform the intimacies of their daily life into monetisable content. By converting private financial pressures into publicly accessible data, Chen adopts a mode of radical transparency to expose the friction between rigid immigration policies and the invisible labour that shapes the migrant’s lived reality.
Image: Liang-Jung Chen, UK Indefinite Leave to Remain Application Fee, 2025. Single-channel Video, 06’00”. Courtesy of the artist.
Dorothy Cheung (b. 1987, Hong Kong)
Be Careful (What You Wish For), 2023
Single-channel video
04’55”
Be Careful (What You Wish For) (2023) is a short essay film about the many journeys taken from one home to another over time.
Image: Dorothy Cheung, Be Careful (What You Wish For), 2023. Single-channel video, 04’55”. Courtesy of the artist.
Hu Wei (b. 1989, China)
Hyper-Architecture 2030, 2021
Single-channel HD video, colour, stereo audio
20’41”
Commissioned by the MACA Art Centre, Beijing
Hyper‑Architecture 2030 (2021) adopts the format of a televised talent show to construct a fictional reality programme set in the 1990s. Drawing on the spectacle‑driven aesthetics and performative tone of early mainland Chinese shows such as Zhengda Variety Show and Lucky 52, the work stages “shortlisted contestants” from different professional fields as they present their respective visions of life in 2030.
Viewed today, these once-speculative futures reveal a divide between those that materialised and those that were abandoned. The programme revives a series of unrealised, radical housing imaginaries: Hannes Meyer’s 1920s “cooperative apartment” for urban nomadic workers; Constant’s New Babylon project from the 1960s; a Korean company’s luxury underground bunker marketed as nuclear protection; alongside contemporary phenomena such as real estate museums and smart new cities. Woven into competition segments and uncanny commercial breaks, these elements reveal how once-radical cultural cultural propositions have since been absorbed into the everyday language of mass media and capital.
Presented in the 4:3 aspect ratio popularised by 1990s television, the work combines mimicry, performance, speech, and gesture that move between absurdity, awkwardness, urgency, and entertainment, deliberately amplifying the flaws and discontinuities such programmes typically conceal.
Image: Hu Wei, Hyper-Architecture 2030, 2021. Single-channel HD video, colour, stereo audio, 20’44”. Commissioned by the MACA Art Centre, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.
Yifan Jiang (b. 1994, China)
One Sunday Morning, 2021
Single-channel animated video
13’12”
One Sunday Morning (2021) is a fable-esque thought experiment that probes the limits of language and human empathy. The narrative begins with humanity’s sudden loss of language on one unsuspecting Sunday morning. Set in a parallel universe that is a magical realist rendering of our reality, the meeting of two characters from opposite sides of the world conceptually crystallises a critical inquiry: what has language afforded humanity, and at what cost?
Image: Yifan Jiang, One Sunday Morning, 2021. Single-channel animated video, 13’12”. Courtesy of the artist.
Lau Wai (b. 1982, Hong Kong)
Decrypted Sentient 2, 2025
4K single-channel CGI animation
08’25”
Decrypted Sentient 2 (2025) is a CGI-animated video in which two identical figures, differentiated only by their clothing, each insist that they are the original and the other a copy. Unaware of their digital construction, they debate and strive to prove their own existence corporeality, seeking ways to understand what they truly are.
Image: Lau Wai, Decrypted Sentient 2, 2025. 4K single-channel CGI animation, 08’25”. Courtesy of the artist.
Li Ning (b. 1992, Hong Kong)
Do You Remember What I Don’t?, 2023
Single-channel video, colour, sound
05’40”
Printmaking is a process in which ink is rolled onto a carved matrix and, through applied pressure, a reversed image is transferred onto another surface. Li Ning came to realise that the technical term “matrix” shares its name with the classic science fiction film The Matrix (1999)—a coincidence that opened an unexpected conceptual point of departure. Do You Remember What I Don’t? (2023) unfolds as a story about memory, imagining a moment when a character within a print suddenly becomes aware of the presence of the matrix. If the world we inhabit is merely an impression akin to a printed surface, can we still perceive the vestiges of its originating plate?
Image: Li Ning, Do You Remember What I Don’t?, 2023. Single‑channel video, colour, sound, 5’40”. Courtesy of the artist.
Dave Lim (b. 1994, Singapore)
The Believers, 2020
Single-channel digital video
15’31”
The Believers (2020) documents the intricate emotional registers that emerge through religious rituals. Moving between the mundane, the exuberant, and the absurd the work explores the intersections of secular and religious life, seeking traces of a shared humanity beneath their apparent tensions.
Image: Dave Lim, The Believers, 2020. Single-channel digital video, 15’31”. Courtesy of the artist.
Jon Rafman (b. 1981, Canada)
Cloudy Heart – Strawberry Moon, 2025
Single-channel video
03’12”
Cloudy Heart is an AI-native pop musician created by the artist Jon Rafman—one of several well-developed characters from his most recent world-building project, ‘Main Stream Media Network’ (2025–ongoing), which envisions a television channel inspired by the monocultural years of MTV music videos and experimental animations. A single from ‘$REAL’, Cloudy Heart’s latest album released in December 2025, Strawberry Moon illustrates her emotive brand of pop, with lyrics that speak to an ever-present anxiety and a desire for self-discovery, dissolution, and release. As described by Interview magazine, “Cloudy Heart is Rafman’s way of playing in the uncanny valley, giving artificial consciousness a distinctively human messiness.”
The song’s music video, which Rafman developed using AI-assisted tools, depicts Cloudy Heart donning virtual reality goggles in her tech-infused bedroom, and entering a series of otherworldly scenes that move fluidly from euphoria to nightmare, and back again.
Image: Jon Rafman, Cloudy Heart – Strawberry Moon, 2025. Single-channel video, 03’12”. Courtesy of the artist.
Joowon Song (b. 1973, Seoul, South Korea)
PungJeong.Gak (風精.刻) A Town with a Blue Hill, 2018
Single-channel video
15’28”
PungJeong.Gak (風精.刻) A Town with a Blue Hill (2018) traces the relationship between body, landscape, and the layered temporalities of a neighbourhood. Through subtle gestures, walking, and moments of attentive stillness, the performer navigates urban scenes where everyday life and historical traces overlap. The camera acts as a choreographic partner, precisely modulating distance, rhythm, and proximity, so that movement becomes a way of sensing and recording space. Rather than presenting the city as a fixed backdrop, the work approaches it as an active entity that shapes the dancer’s perception and decisions. The “blue hill” functions as both a physical landmark and a poetic metaphor—a quiet horizon holding memories, absences, and future possibility. The film invites viewers to perceive the city through the body, encountering place as an intimate choreography of time, texture, and coexistence.
Image: Joowon Song, PungJeong.Gak (風精.刻) A Town with a Blue Hill, 2018. Single-channel video, 15’28”. Courtesy of the artist.
Adrian Wong (b. 1980, United States)
With Love from Hong Kong (Episode 1), 2025
Single-channel video
24’22”
With Love from Hong Kong (2025) extends Adrian Wong’s ongoing investigation into pulp television and cinema, highlighting the intersections between media tropes and his own family history. In 1986, during the golden age of the televised melodrama, Wong’s grandmother immigrated from Hong Kong to suburban Chicago. Despite her unfamiliarity with American cultural contexts and minimal understanding of English, she spent the final decades of her life immersed in the fantasy worlds of American soap operas—at times blurring their storylines and the routines of her own daily life. Mining the genre as both material and methodology, Wong creates a series of vignettes drawn from his grandmother’s lived experience, collaborating with a team of scriptwriters, production crew, and seasoned Hong Kong television actors to dramatise new scenes that adopt and mirror her frame of reference in reverse.
Image: Adrian Wong, With Love from Hong Kong (Episode 1), 2025. Single-channel video, 24’22”. Courtesy of the artist.
Adrian Wong (b. 1980, United States)
With Hate from Hong Kong, 2025
Single-channel video
18’00”
Commissioned by Singapore Biennale 2025
With Hate from Hong Kong (2025) revisits the career of Wong’s paternal grandfather, Eddie Wang, a prolific composer who scored over 300 films for Hong Kong-based studios from the early 1960s until his death in 1981. At the height of the genre’s popularity, the surging appetite for kung fu films compelled studios to turn toward unorthodox production practices. Some assembled new films from pre-shot footage, which they then edited, scored and dubbed to produce some semblance of narrative structure. Adapting this process of found narrative, Wong’s video combines footage from With Love From Hong Kong (Episode 1) (2025)—an earlier project that borrows melodramatic tropes from daytime soap operas—with new stunt work and fight sequences performed by lookalikes. By mobilising familiar narrative and production conventions, the collaged footage inverts the gendered codes of soap operas, granting its female protagonist access to the exaggerated, stylised violence characteristic of martial arts films.
Image: Adrian Wong, With Hate from Hong Kong, 2025. Single‑channel video, 18’00”. Commissioned by Singapore Biennale 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Doris Wong Wai Yin (b. 1981, Hong Kong)
Transparent Scattering, 2026
Single-channel video
05’50”
Transparent Scattering (2026) emerges from a series of speculative short videos that probe the convergence of colour histories, technology, and human experience. The work develops a cultural discourse around the notion of transparency, as Wong weaves together AI‑generated imagery, found footage, and graphic elements into a constellation of visual fragments that engage with plausible narratives derived from AI‑supported research.
Across the video, Wong navigates ideas ranging from the impact of emerging technologies to the rhetoric of toxic positivity. The work moves fluidly between fairy tale, lived reality, and speculative futures, meditating on the entanglement of the digital and the deeply personal. Wong invites viewers to consider how technology, emotion, and the social imperative toward optimism intersect to shape contemporary subjectivities.
Image: Doris Wong Wai Yin, Transparent Scattering, 2026. Single-channel video, 5’50”. Courtesy of the artist.
