Selected by Lu Yang
I really liked Sun Kuixing’s graduation work NewHeart Rehearsal, which was presented at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2022. This live performance work combined virtual reality and gaming, with interactions between live performers and a videogame that the artist had created for the work. I was amazed at the sense of diverse layers and the natural use of multimedia tools, a fractured universe created between the real-time performance and the movements within the game. At points, rooms filled to the brim with mannequinlike figures can be seen in the game, with players needing to recite lines in German from East German playwright Heiner Müller’s short, symbolic play about love, Herzstück (1983), in order to proceed in the game. The performers on the stage and the spirits in virtual reality are both unfolding in front of the audience, realising the possibility of two parallel worlds being presented together. In particular, the presence of VR glasses on their own, hanging midair without anyone apparently using them, gives the audience the illusion that there really is a spiritual entity or a life in a parallel universe in the world that the VR glasses represent. Whether you might define this as theatrical work or a game work, it is impossible to perfectly express the breakthrough of the piece: the reality and illusory, the drama in the play, the dream in the dream, the viewer and the object being watched – all these boundaries are blurred. It’s a complex blurring that seems to take place across Sun’s live event-works, whether the linking of performers in Tokyo and at Tank Shanghai in Swim Lanes #2 (2021), collaborating live to create a surreal, mixed-media installation, or delivering the performance-lecture Prophecy #1 (2020) at the Goethe-Institut Tokyo, which linked medical and religious imagery in the wake of the pandemic. An exhilarating mix that I hope will have the opportunity to be presented on more stages!
Sun Kuixing is based in Tokyo. Recent performances of her work include Swim Lanes #2, Tank Shanghai, 2021, and Prophet #1, Goethe-Institut Tokyo, 2020
Lu Yang is a digital artist based in Tokyo whose solo exhibition Vibratory Field, 2023, is currently on view at Kunsthalle Basel
