Hui Wai-Keung

ARTICLE: NEITHER ARCHAIC, ARCANE, NOR ANACHRONISTIC: THE MULTIFACETED REMEDIATIONS OF HUI WAI-KEUNG’S RE-DÜRER

Hui Wai-Keung, Re-Dürer, three channel video installation, generated graphics from video game hacking, 2016, Hong Kong

VRAL is currently showcasing Parallel V by Hui Wai-Keung, a work that serves both as sequel and homage to Harun Farocki’s Parallel I-IV series (2012-2014). To provide a comprehensive context for this piece, we delve into the artist’s oeuvre, expanding our critical examination with the monumental project Re-Dürer (2016), which was originally presented in the context of the exhibition GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.

Albrecht Dürer’s iconic early 16th century engravings Knight, Death and the Devil, Melencolia I and Saint Jerome in His Study deftly capture the melancholy temperament then informing the Northern Renaissance zeitgeist. Each work brims with allegorical symbols and objects freighted with shifting meaning across spiritual, philosophical and creative domains. In Knight, Death and the Devil, a stoic rider perseveres past Death and the Devil, communicating fortitude and moral resolve. Melencolia I portrays a winged angel seated pensively amidst tools of science and art, surrounded by mystical geometries hinting at creative aporia. Saint Jerome in His Study shows the scholarly saint reading in a meticulously detailed monastic cell, worldly threats held at bay.

Half a millennium later, the Hong Kong-based interdisciplinary artist Hui Wai-Keung radically reinterpreted this trilogy through the digital medium of video games in his 2016 video installation Re-Dürer. Hui hacked Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto V (2013), disrupting graphics, mechanics and physics to stage complex tableaux which reconfigure themes of morality, creativity, faith, and knowledge within Dürer’s works and adding new layers of meaning, courtesy of Joseph Beuys. Displayed across three channels, Hui’s “reworks” – as he terms them – add a patina of irony and existential absurdity by transposing early modern symbology into the chaotic contemporary milieu of Los Santos, GTA V’s deranged, hyper-realistic urban sandbox.

The jarring juxtaposition of Renaissance sensibility with nihilistic virtuality in Re-Dürer generates cognitive dissonance in the viewer, short-circuiting inherited cultural schema. Are utopian aspirations still viable in worlds increasingly coded and commodified? What becomes of contemplation in spaces defined by endless aggression and appropriation no longer even recognized as such? Hui implies that the 21st century experience offers little safety from the persistent existential threats embodied by Death and the Devil in Dürer’s era. Perhaps only…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Hui Wai-Keung, Re-Dürer, three channel video installation, featuring generated graphics from hacking/modding Grand Theft Auto V, 2016.

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ARTICLE: DANCING WITH MYSELF: HUI WAI-KEUNG WOULD RATHER NOT PLAY

Hui Wai-Keung, No Play Today, In-game performance in Anarchy Online, 2005 (still)

VRAL is currently showcasing Parallel V by Hui Wai-Keung, a work that serves both as a sequel and an homage to Harun Farocki’s Parallel I-IV series (2012-2014). To provide a comprehensive context for this piece, we delve into the artist's oeuvre, beginning our critical examination with No Play Today (2005).

In October 2005, artist Hui Wai-Keung staged a subversive intervention within the sprawling virtual world of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Anarchy Online (2001). For days, his avatar Alenila defiantly danced amidst the chaos of the Temple of the Three Winds, a notoriously fierce battlefield where players typically hack and slash to progress, not pirouette. This apparent non sequitur – out-of-place dancing rupturing a space reserved for programmed violence and brutal conquest – forms the basis of Hui’s provocation titled No Play Today. At once absurd, futile and profound, his choice to inject poetic play into pre scripted gameplay remains significant on multiple levels.

First and foremost, No Play Today complicates the relationship between play and modern video game environments. As Hui elucidates, the expected form of “play” in spaces like MMORPGs largely replicates hegemonic power structures, privileging might and domination. Players internalize capitalist mandates valorizing ceaseless competition, individualism, and instrumental exploitation. Those flouting these agendas face quizzical, even hostile resistance from game communities invested in established hierarchies. Why dance when one could (should) fight? Any such spontaneous expressions violating this ingrained social code threaten the status quo.

Yet Hui’s intervention also suggests emancipatory potential still dormant and underdeveloped in these virtual play spaces. His dancing avatar becomes a zany performance event, generating liminal spaces where the assumptions are actively sabotaged. Relying on sheer spectacle to disarm players and reject genre conventions, Hui replaces individualism with a communal, aesthetic experience. A fellow player even spontaneously joins in this triumphant deviance, discovering alternative relations founded on wonder rather than antagonism. However brief before reprisals resume the rupture hints that regimes of separation are not total. Unscripted connections remain possible. One is reminded of Joseph Delappe’s dead-in-iraq (2006-), in which the emergent gameplay (writing the names of the fallen American soldiers in a video game chat as an anti-violence statement) is quickly squashed by annoyed players.

Apropos DeLappe we can situate No Play Today in a trajectory of related performative interrogations of gaming space. Notably, the seminal 2002 project Velvet-Strike provides a resonant precedent of artistic intervention disrupting the dominant gameplay. The eponymous downloadable software package by Anne-Marie Schleiner, Joan Leandre and Brody Condon enabled participants to “spray” pacifist messages and images as graffiti amidst standard death match fury in Counter-Strike. This act of disseminating rainbows or daisies rather than employing firearms to annihilate other players, sardonically questioned the erasure of empathy encouraged by first-person shooters.

No Play Today continues this tradition of employing jarring aesthetic dissonance to…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Hui Wai-Keung, No Play Today, in-game performance in Anarchy Online, 2005 hereby shown as a machinima documentation, color/sound, 5’ 37”, 2005.

Hui Wai-Keung, Parallel V, digital video, single-channel-projection, color, sound, 26’ 14”, 2023.

Pippin Barr, Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment, video game, 2011.

Anne-Marie Schleiner, Joan Leandre and Brody Condon, Velvet Strike, modification of Counter-Strike, 2002. (recommended: Rhizome's critical text about this work)

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EVENT: HUI WAI-KEUNG (FEBRUARY 16 - 29 2024, ONLINE)

Parallel V

digital video, single-channel-projection, color, sound, 26’ 14”, 2023, Hong Kong

Created by Hui Wai-Keung

World premiere

Conceived by Hui Wai-Keung as a tribute to Harun Farocki, Parallel V is a continuation of his seminal Parallel I-IV series investigating the operational logic of computer games. The point of departure for Hui is a statement by the late German director on the computer-controller characters’ tendency to repeat the same actions over and over again: “This tragedy revealed the limitations of human freedom of action”. Hui discovered that all NPCs seem trapped in a time-space bond with the player, a relationship of ontological dependence. NPCs live life-like existences; repetitions are inevitable in their simulated lives. And yet, Hui suggests, the algorithmic bounds of games are not absolute, and NPCs still encounter contingencies. Thus, both NPCs and human beings might be better off following Friedrich Nietzsche’s admonition, embracing rather than rejecting repetition.

Hui Wai-Keung is a Hong Kong-born cross-disciplinary artist currently pursuing a PhD in Art Creation and Theory at Tainan National University of the Arts in Taiwan. Hui received his MFA from the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong and studied at the Hong Kong Art School. In recent years he has focused especially on game art and algorithmic art, exploring visual possibilities in digital hyperspace. Hui has exhibited widely in solo and group shows in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Finland, Italy and the USA. Hui has completed artist residencies in Germany, Finland, South Korea, and Japan. Currently based in Taiwan, Hui continues to exhibit and conduct research into narrative, algorithms, possibility, contingency, reenactment, and history.