John Wong, RuChu AR, 2020, 27 min, AR App.
Nominated by K11 Art Foundation.
RuChu, “如初” in Chinese characters, means “as the beginning”. This work is inspired by and based on I-Ching, the book of changes and a classic Chinese philosophical text that Wong (HK) has been studying over 10 years. He noticed an interesting and mesmerizing pattern hidden in the repeated keywords: Pattern visualisation is a core aesthetic in Wong’s work. The artist is interested to explore and trace back to the beginning of Chinese culture’s subconsciousness or ‘DNA’ through looking at the frequency of characters that appear in the full text, forming the pattern of our subconsciousness. The AR work displays the full text (4152 Chinese characters) of I-Ching as the visual base. A cursor runs from top left to bottom right. When the cursor hits any word or phrase that frequently repeats itself in the whole text, the same word or phrase (All) will be translated into English and pronounced in English by the computer. For example, “无咎” will become “NO REGRET”, “吉” will become “GOOD”, “凶” will become “BAD”, etc. The cursor loops the whole text again and again like a hypnosis with the I-Ching’s pattern analysis.