Huidi Xiang

In my art practice, I make sculptural objects, installations, and systems to probe the spatial and temporal effects of inhabiting both virtual and physical worlds in late capitalism. I am interested in the constant wrestlings, negotiations, and translations between the virtual digital contexts and the tangible sensorial world we occupy with our bodies in an era dominated by onscreen and networked experiences. By reimagining and reconstructing elements from different on- and off-line contexts in my life, I create works to construct a realm in between, intending to cultivate alternative narratives to illustrate and fathom emerging politics and critical issues associated with the ever-expansive merging between the physical and the virtual, the real and the simulated, and the fact and the fiction in today's world.

My current research focuses on the complex interplay between play and labor in our contemporary life, where the boundaries between these two are increasingly blurred. It seems like the combination of play and labor can make both more productive and fun. Yet new exploitative logic in the guise of fun, self-engaged, and self-actualization emerges. Starting from my own exhausting and work-like gaming experience while playing life simulation video games, my research topics now include the laborious gaming culture, game worker, alienated play, the notion of gamification, the burnout culture, and the growing virtual telematic economies. Using my sculptural language, I construct a personal ontology to articulate my idiosyncratic experience and research, with the aim to understand the more extensive renewed labor structure in late capitalism. In my most recent projects working with video games like "Animal Crossing" and "Minecraft," I also incorporate data tracing and collecting as a durational performative action. Using analog gestures like manually documenting my digital gaming activities with spreadsheets and journals, I am exploring the intersection of the physical and the virtual from a "play-labor" perspective, questioning the inaccessibility to the data on digital platforms, challenging invisible rules of the existing systems, and contemplating my involvement and participation as an artist in our post-industrial post-internet society.