Reality bytes

Cyberpunk has indirectly affected (and often reflected) Hong Kong's visual culture, but through refractions of novels, movies and, in particular, anime, its influence has been pervasive. The present also offers a particular prism: how the cybermetropolis has shifted from a fantastic metaphor for life in the future into an inescapable, looping present.

Far from having become outdated, cyberpunk's dystopian scenes-its protagonists, networked and yet isolated, navigate neo-noir city streets that are illuminated by the glare of commerce-look like an average night on the town in 2019, whether you're in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Tokyo or Jakarta. Like so much that was once seen as pre-millennium "cyber" or "virtual"-as outside of us, a separate and distinct terrain to be explored or conquered in a neocolonial fashion-the realms of cyberpunk have begun to seem less like an otherworldly plane and more like a funhouse mirror of our world, lives and histories.

As part of the exhibition, Hong Kong-based art collective Zheng Mahler's 2019 installation Nostalgia Machines highlights how Asian urban spaces continue to be evoked through techno-orientalist fantasies of the West, but also in the dystopian imagining of the future in Japanese popular culture such as anime.