In it, Feng is a war correspondent who has, TRON-like, entered a computer generated Quake dungeon to interview "The clones, " his term for the game-bred opponents that players (you) kill.
Wearing an army helmet, carrying a DV camera and dangling a cigarette from the side of his mouth, his character is half-comical.
He moves through the virtual scenes of carnage interviewing clones, like CNN reporters interview Kurds (these days), reporting on the number of clone deaths needed to develop some new weapon and relating the last words of some kid (a player): "When God is dead, you'll know it!!" Then he surprises his news anchor by deciding to defect to the clones in support of their impossible cause.
If the question is: "Does video game violence generate real violence?" Feng's is an absurdist answer. He produced Q3 the same year America was searching its own conscience in the wake of the Columbine High School massacre, in which two teenage Doom junkies killed 13 of their fellow students and teachers in a real life shooting spree. And sitting in front of a CRT monitor in a Beijing apartment on the other side of the world, he replied: "Is it overkill? Yes. Am I addicted to it? Absolutely."
Feng's statement is more about how people generate a system of beliefs out of the information that surrounds them.
Many of his early works deal with the Maoist imagery of his early childhood, which he views ironically, as when he turns Mao's mighty arm sweep into the capitalist gesture for hailing a taxi.
But, at the same time, the Cultural Revolution was the only childhood he had, and he won't betray its propaganda completely.
There is always an element of nostalgia. Even now, as the exhibition catalogue admits, he prefers Yang Zirong to Arnold Schwarzenegger or Superman.
So he skips these alien Hollywood heroes completely and moves on to a cyberspace where he feels more free to project his own images.
There, Yang Zirong is free to be a hero again.
Past Virtualized -- Future Cloned is on display through July 27 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (
RSS