In this video series, the three artists presented in the exhibition are in fact performed by other artists. The work adopts the modular language of media interviews—framing the subject, their gestures, working process, spoken narrative, and editorial construction. Displayed alongside each exhibited work, the video appears to introduce the artist and their practice. Yet while the footage remains real, the roles are displaced: artist-actors articulate the exhibited artists’ statements, while simultaneously exposing their own actual processes of making.

Contemporary institutions, through streaming media, construct a public imagination of the artist—establishing a dual structure of how an artist is expected to be seen, and how one learns to become such a figure.

As these expectations consolidate into criteria for what is recognised as “good” contemporary art, the artist’s identity becomes entangled with institutionally designed rules of the game. Like the absence of mirrors in Disneyland restrooms, or the coloured transition screens in role-playing games that prevent players from catching their own reflection, these mechanisms suspend self-awareness. Whether in themed environments or virtual worlds, such systems enable the adoption of identities detached from the self. In this sense, contemporary art no longer operates solely as an expression of personal experience, but as a calibrated production of affect—one that seeks resonance and generates specific responses.