Phantom Plane, Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong 5 October – 4 January Living in unhappy exile during the Second World War, Bertolt Brecht wrote that rapidly expanding Los Angeles was proof that God didn’t need to build two residences for the dead. Heaven alone would suffice, he suggested, because it could serve ‘the unprosperous, unsuccessful / As hell’. That the hypercapitalist city of the future will double as utopia and dystopia – it’s only a matter of wealth and privilege – is a trope of the science-fiction genre cyberpunk, to which this timely exhibition of work by 21 artists is addressed. On the ground floor, Lee Bul’s After Bruno Taut (Beware the sweetness of things) (2007) sets the tone by translating the modernist architect’s Alpine fantasia into a steel-and-glass model suspended from the ceiling. Such an Elysian project might have seemed emancipatory when Taut proposed it in 1918, but a century later Lee’s floating structure suggests the privacy-free megalopolises envisioned by surveillance states. That sense of menace permeates the eye-poppingly lit paintings of Tetsuya Ishida – in which isolated citizens inhabit a Kafkaesque bureaucracy ruled over by inhuman hybrids – and the mixed-media assemblages of Tishan Hsu – inorganic materials and biomorphic forms combining in grisly cyborgian visions. Made during the 1980s, these
works prophesy a near-future at once intricately networked and thoroughly alienating, a progress that imprisons as many as it liberates. Published in 1984, William Gibson’s Neuromancer was among the first genre novels to predict how the architectures of digital space would be designed to control transgressive desires. Cleverly installed in the museum’s lobby as a preface to the exhibition, Seth Price’s Romance (2003) documents the artist’s attempts to move freely through the artificially constructed world of an early text-based videogame. Conducted in a scrolling written exchange between artist and program, the latter’s impatient rebukes to the artist’s aimless curiosity (‘you find nothing of interest’) are a reminder that coded realities are, if anything, less tolerant of drift or resistance than their meatspace analogues. Which might explain why the antiheroes of cyberpunk are so often hackers, among them net.art pioneers jodi, represented here by the deconstructed videogame sod (1999). The desire to operate off-grid is shared by the groups of black-clad protesters who, in the streets around Tai Kwun on the day of my visit, are meticulously smashing cctv cameras. The relationship between the state, technology and freedom cannot be mistaken for an academic issue in Hong Kong, and several
works reimagine a city that served (like the Tokyo documented in Takehiko Nakafuji’s estranging black-and-white photographs) as model for cyberpunk’s visions of the future. Orientalist fantasies of neon-drenched Asian megalopolises collide with local anxieties about lost identities in Shinro Ohtake’s retrofuturistic assemblage Mon Cheri: A Self-Portrait as a Scrapped Shed (2012) and Ho Rui An’s video Student Bodies (2019), one of several to use ghosts as metaphor for those left behind by the technologisation of society and the abstraction of communities. A city in which residents take refuge from the dismal present in artificial simulations of an idealised past is the subject of an animatedvideo installation by Zheng Mahler (a collaboration between artist Royce Ng and anthropologist Daisy Bisenieks). Nostalgia Machines (2019) offers a final reminder that cities might no longer need to be segregated by class or colour to enforce social hierarchies: people sharing the same physical space will operate in different realities and, consequently, simply stop seeing each other. As I walk through Hong Kong’s elevated walkways, peering occasionally over the edge to observe the violence playing out on the streets below while fellow pedestrians attend to their phones, it seems that Ballardian future may already have arrived. Ben Eastham
Zheng Mahler (in collaboration with Reijiro Aoyama), Nostalgia Machines, 2019, video installation, 15 min. Courtesy the artists
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