Every year, Hong Kong hosts Art Basel, a huge international art show. As you can imagine, most of the works on offer are both expensive and a little impenetrable to those of us who aren’t art collectors or curators.
But this year, the show also features a much more accessible display: vintage video games projected onto the facade of a 1,588 foot tall skyscraper.
The lightshow, “Same Old, Brand New”, is the work of Chinese artist Cao Fei, well-known for her video installations and works commenting on the country’s younger generation.
According to the Art Basel website, the work represents young peoples’ “strategies for overcoming and escaping reality” (so, playing games, basically) and the “rapid and chaotic changes that are occurring across Chinese society”.
The show is playing between 13 and 17 March, and onlookers can also download an app which plays accompanying music inspired scored by composer Dickson Dee and inspired by the soundtracks to 1980s videogames.
Here’s a timelapse from the Wall Street Journal showing the light show in action on the walls of the International Commerce Centre:
And here’s the tower covered in Pac-Man heats
This isn’t the first time the ICC has played host to a lightshow. There’s also this psychadelic example from last year:
We can only imagine how annoying this must have been for any office workers inside.
