Radical Patience for Everyone and No One

by Sharon Liu

Zeng Hong’s digital exhibition, Metro via Virtual, opens with patches of half-transparent baby pink and mint green drifting like clouds across a map of Hong Kong. Hollow bubbles represent artworks, each one pinned to a location in the city. Since 2020, Zeng has invited five groups of artists to present their observations of Hong Kong through advanced imaging technologies.

Considering the timing of this show, Metro via Virtual emerged during the height of the pandemic amid the Metaverse hype — remember that? — in 2021. The 2025 website launch compels the curator and artists to reimagine how an exhibition narrates, unfolds, and survives in people’s memories.

Metro via Virtual works as both an experience and as a visual archive. The interactive elements and personalized pacing enhance the visitor’s experience. The digital format creates new connections between artworks that wouldn’t be possible with usual physical and time constraints. After removing the constraints—for example not indicating an end date, the exhibition becomes more about archiving artworks for continuous access and reference. Scholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger warns that we should reset the balance in a digital age to “make forgetting just a tiny bit easier again than remembering.”¹ His claim about memory, authorship, and control of digital content is relevant to some curatorial choices for a digital exhibition. An exhibition often gives the illusion of fleeting content, but if it archives all work indefinitely, it might outlive the original context, fix the interpretations of artworks, and turn memory into data to be retrieved. In this sense, digital exhibitions might not only be as ways to preserve and access art, but as sites where design choices reflect power dynamics.

In Metro via Virtual, this dual purpose is reflected in the way artists or the curator maintain control of viewer’s experience while creating a sense of non-linearity; in other words, multiple unpredictable pathways of engaging with the work. Presented online, Kat Suryna’s Presence series (2020-ongoing) takes full advantage of the digital format, offering both a carefully designed viewing angle of each piece and opportunities for personalized engagement. The Presence series can be understood through various lenses, whether historical, cultural, or personal. The series reimagines the iconography of Gandhara Buddha, embedding its image within a QR code, surrounding it with flowers as if the Buddha is suffocating, or illuminating a Buddha sculpture by shifting angles under a spotlight. By juxtaposing the image of Buddha with impressions of a capitalist world—for example, the proliferation of ads and the digital commodification of spirituality behind a QR code—Suryna ties her work to themes of self-alienation and consumerism, posing questions about identity, the nature of reality in digital spaces, and the complexities of contemporary culture.

When Suryna exhibited Illumination in a physical space, the artist noticed that sometimes people would approach her paintings from the “wrong” angle or direction. The online presentation would enable artists and the curator to direct viewers’ attention to see a familiar image of Buddha in an unfamiliar way. Thus, viewers would notice the skewed or demonic side of the Buddha image. In an interview about the presentation format, Suryna concluded, “I also think that re-mediation of a traditional artwork within digital media may add new, exciting layers of meaning and lead to a better appreciation of that artwork.” As she says, digital media as a medium creates connections between images and some new contexts and endows artists with freedom to insert their voices.² Rather than suggesting that artists use visual cues to instruct or instill some ideas to teach, I view it as every element and perception of artworks being intentional, each imbued with a directedness toward a thing, a being, or a concept. Viewers might selectively pick up certain visual cues and follow their own pathways through the digital exhibition. The non-linear nature of viewing artworks does not erase the artists’ intent; rather, they weave narrative frameworks into their works, inviting viewers to reimagine these stories that reflect Hong Kong’s complex history and culture through the artists’ own lens.

How, then, can videos and other time-based art be less rigid in their structures to effectively convey complex narratives? Artist Nam June Paik celebrated the removal of “structure” from digital art, observing that time-based media like videotape and television could feel dull sometimes, as traditional media forces viewers to consume content in a predefined way.³ The non-linearity of digital archives fundamentally changes our relationship with time-based media, such as Elaine Wong’s Butterflies on the Wheel (2020) and Riar Rizaldi’s Domestik/Publik (2020). Unlike traditional exhibitions where videos play within fixed exhibition dates and viewing hours, these artworks now exist in a virtual site—always accessible yet never bound to a specific moment of reception.

Wong’s video montage features disjointed scenes of Hong Kong’s urban landscape photos projected across her living room. The viewer is asked to actively piece together all elements in the work: the domestic intimacy of the bedroom, serving as the framing device for the video, contrasts sharply with scenes on the wall of an intense Hong Kong urban environment. The title—Butterflies on the Wheel—extends this tension and evokes the violent image of butterflies shattered in a blender, forming a critique of urban development in Hong Kong. Similarly, Rizaldi’s Domestik/Publik (2020), a work about Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong, rearranges the audio recordings into a soundscape resembling an Indonesian radio play. The work is carefully structured in a way that, while non-linear, uses vocal parts and auditory cues to evoke characters, emotions, actions, and plots, guiding the viewer toward a narrative structure that is unequivocally socially charged.

Vvzela Kook’s Confidential Records: Dual Metropolitans (2016-2018) offers another way to rethink narrative of time-based media art. The ten-minute video employs 3D animation to reconstruct hallways and aerial views of Kowloon Walled City during the period of British colonization. Within this reconstructed space unfolds a speculative story: an underground, human-managed city fights for survival against an AI-controlled overground metropolis. As viewers move through the 3D-rendered corridors of the underground Kowloon city, the design of the interface, such as a small real-time two-dimensional map, reminds viewers of video games and prompts them to consider possible choices within the digital space. While carefully guiding viewers’ progression through the imagined world, Kook creates an experience that draws them into the illusion of agency by adopting gaming aesthetics.

The archival nature of a digital exhibition without end dates transforms time-based media art further when we consider works like games created using algorithms or incorporating participants’ input. With time and patience, viewers/gamers can understand game narratives, visual and auditory designs, or even glitches in the conversations, immerse themselves in their feelings, and formulate interpretations about how games are framed within social, cultural, and political contexts. Andrew Luk, Alexis Mailles, and Peter Nelson’s game Autosave: Redoubt (2018) recreated digitally the architecture of WWII bunkers in Hong Kong. The immersive experience their work creates might overshadow critical reflection and make it harder for viewers to step back and think about what they are seeing. However, games work with other types of attention and skills—peripheral attention that focuses on what might appear at the edges of the screen or horizon and visual-spatial skills that are related to certain aspects of digital reading. According to the artists, Autosave’s players will have to realize in the middle of the game the impossibility of making certain turns. Players will also notice how certain spaces trigger some music, an intentional design choice that reconstructs the historical site in a way that isn’t necessarily realistic.⁴ This synchronicity between specific rules and the music guides the player’s experience, subtly connecting the game’s architecture to Hong Kong’s colonial past. These discoveries, though not immediately apparent, are part of the artist’s carefully crafted steps, gradually guiding the player toward an understanding of the architectural design, its awkward elements, and the lyrical retelling of the colonial history embedded within the game.

This exhibition site exists like an open letter that is in perpetual delivery, sent to unknown recipients whose private moments of reading remain invisible. Though we cannot witness these moments of engagement, it is the hope of a virtual exhibition to offer fresh perspectives on reality. This form of storytelling creates a more inclusive viewing experience, accessible to a wider range of audiences. Viewers can engage with artworks at their own pace no matter where they are located. In an interview with Riar Rizaldi, he said, “I tried to make a soundscape that a friend of mine, a domestic worker, can also listen to on their weekends to somehow enjoy their time, so it’s like something I also want to present, giving back the knowledge they (domestic workers) gave me.”⁵ Now, the virtual platform stands, its site publicized. We are left with the lingering questions: Who in real life can find this portal? Would this portal change, decay, and disappear? What does it mean to build an archive for everyone and potentially no one?

¹ Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 128–132; Kate Eichhorn, The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 65.

² Kat Suryna, email interview with the author, 2021.

³ Nam June Paik, “Random Access Information,” Artforum, March 1, 2000, https://www.artforum.com/features/random-access-information-213569.

⁴ “Serious Games,” exhibition eBook, curated by Fu Liaoliao, HOW Art Museum (Shanghai), August 2–November 2, 2019, PDF, https://www.howartmuseum.org/ (accessed Oct. 9th, 2024).

⁵ Riar Rizaldi, Zoom interview with the author, 2021.

About the author

Sharon X. Liu is a curator, researcher, and translator based in New York. Her recent exhibitions include Laborious Hands (Amherst College Library, 2024-25), Part of an Impossible Task: Michael Rakowitz (Amherst College Mead Art Museum, 2024), and Retrieving and Revitalizing: From Yurakucho to Yangon (YAU Studio, Tokyo, 2023). She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Art History and Mathematics from Wellesley College and obtained her master’s degree in East Asian Studies from Yale University.