Title: Cyber JiangHu/赛博江湖
Version: 1.1.2
Medium: VR GameArt (installation)
Year: 2020-2025
Cyber JiangHu (CJH) is an immersive digital world of sensory information system generated by string figures, where you can fully experience Neoliberal Consumer Subject’s Fabulation…No matter who you were before, you must do the Selfie Performance when you are in Cyber JiangHu…
Cyber JiangHu is a VR-based GameArt installation comprising nine interactive scenes, four navigational paths, and three interwoven narrative strands. Set in a speculative near-future, the work imagines a society in which humans deploy intelligent avatars to counteract the erosion of bodily function and rely on AI technologies to preserve consciousness. The player inhabits “Xiao Mei,” a female-coded digital agent on the verge of self-awareness, traversing a fragmented virtual world that invites reflection on gender, identity, technological mediation, and the ethics of posthuman life.
Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage and Luce Irigaray’s theory of mimesis, the artist introduces a strategic perceptual mode termed “active superficiality.” Cute aesthetics—expressed through techno-pink hues, fluffy textures, and hyper-polished surfaces—operate not as stylistic flourishes, but as aesthetic interventions that disrupt cognitive expectations and sensorial comfort.
Rather than presenting a linear narrative, Cyber JiangHu operates as a procedural system of fragmented data, coded triggers, and algorithmic play. Participants are invited to construct their own trajectories of meaning and embodiment. A built-in selfie function further folds the player’s image into the system: filtered, recoded, and returned as an estranged avatar—enacting a computational mirror stage within the digital environment.
Installation view:
HAN YAJUAN+ 