There may be beautiful scenery along the way, and there may also be emotions such as anxiety and fear, but they are all temporary. It may be a pity that you cannot control and stay.
Environment Art: Room
Chenyu Lin: I am very happy to invite Mr. Zhong to hold an online solo exhibition! In your works, you mentioned using a visual way to record some lost common memories. The style is mostly dream-like or pessimistic. What is the reason for this?
Hui Zhong: When I was studying in Hong Kong, I loved reading Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" and made a small website to record my dreams. I always dream about my childhood living environment: family, village, etc., and I also dream about some relatives and many natural elements. Sometimes I dream of a storm outside my hometown, which is like an ocean and white. Slowly, I found that my dreams seem to have a homology with the current dreamcore, so I became a blogger who produces "dreamcore". I think "dreamcore" is a culture that is both private and public. Creation generally draws inspiration from dreams and memories, and then combines the more popular childcore, poolcore, and injurycore to develop. As for the pessimistic feeling, I was not pessimistic when I was creating it. I just tried to convey the feeling that memories and dreams cannot stay, just like the subjective perspective that keeps traveling in the video, with no starting point and no end point. There may be beautiful scenery along the way, and there may also be emotions such as anxiety and fear, but they are all temporary. It may be a pity that you cannot control and stay.
Environment Art: Snowy night
KE: Your graduation project is about both rebuilding and escaping from a hometown that no longer exists. Please share with us the reason behind this.
HUI: First of all, no longer existing is indeed disappearing in the physical sense. I happened to go back to my hometown before graduation and found that the house I had repeatedly dreamed of had been fenced off and was about to be demolished, and all the residents had moved out. So I walked around the road outside the wall a few times and took some videos as a souvenir. When I was creating the graduation project, I thought why not make it? So I started to refer to the video and combined it with memories to try to reproduce it.
But what I want to express more is the disappearance of my hometown in my spirit. My hometown is a rural area in western Guangdong. I am a typical student who is expected by my family. I went to elementary school in the town, went to junior high school in the county, and then to the science experimental class of the city high school. Later, I went to Wuhan University. Everyone around me thought that as long as I continued to follow this upward path and did not make mistakes, a better "life" would definitely be expected. But in my senior year of high school, I actually had a very troublesome psychological problem. I suffered from insomnia for the whole year, worried that I would not get good grades in the exams, worried that I would let my family down. Haha, it was a very abnormal mentality. During the most serious period, I didn't go to school much. I rested at home every day. During the day, I repeatedly wandered around the streets of the town and thought. One day, I suddenly figured out my life goal: I should fight against this system composed of single-standard screening and performance-based rewards and penalties.
Environment Art: Pool
HuiZhong: So when I was an undergraduate, I was planning how to escape every day, started painting and creating, and I didn't go home much for five years. Before graduating from undergraduate school, I was actually very confused because I realized that this escape plan seemed to be a farce. I didn't produce any good works, nor did I establish a path to move forward. I tried to do self-media and short video animation, but I found that I didn't like to cater to the public, so I really didn't know how to do it. I graduated from school and couldn't stay in the big city because I had no income, so I had to go back to my hometown. It was a weird or shameful thing to go to a good university but return to a small town to do nothing. It was very embarrassing, so I lived alone for a year and didn't socialize much. Of course, it also gave me time to reflect on my growth, family relationships and life trajectory. People living here are still trapped in the same values ​​and systems. I can feel that I am in a state of freedom everywhere, and I have completely lost the concept of my hometown mentally. When I was a child, I just wanted to escape. When I grew up, I tried to rebuild but failed. Where should I go? Maybe the virtual world can be a new hometown, so I started to create with 3D at that time.
Environment Art: Crazy Cars
HuiZhong: So when I was an undergraduate, I was planning how to escape every day, started painting and creating, and I didn't go home much for five years. Before graduating from undergraduate school, I was actually very confused because I realized that this escape plan seemed to be a farce. I didn't produce any good works, nor did I establish a path to move forward. I tried to do self-media and short video animation, but I found that I didn't like to cater to the public, so I really didn't know how to do it. I graduated from school and couldn't stay in the big city because I had no income, so I had to go back to my hometown. It was a weird or shameful thing to go to a good university but return to a small town to do nothing. It was very embarrassing, so I lived alone for a year and didn't socialize much. Of course, it also gave me time to reflect on my growth, family relationships and life trajectory. People living here are still trapped in the same values ​​and systems. I can feel that I am in a state of freedom everywhere, and I have completely lost the concept of my hometown mentally. When I was a child, I just wanted to escape. When I grew up, I tried to rebuild but failed. Where should I go? Maybe the virtual world can be a new hometown, so I started to create with 3D at that time.
Environment Art: Seashore
Keyi Zhang: What is the process of this game? Can everyone go in and interact? Can you briefly describe the general content from the beginning to the completion?
Hui Zhong: The game was originally designed to have many levels of gameplay, but due to the production time cycle, it was finally simplified to two steps. One is to explore and understand the surrounding environment, events and other scenes that carry the projection of the social environment when you are young. The player will play a little boy walking through it to understand, listen and observe. To put it bluntly, it is a first-person roaming simulator. There is a node in the middle, connecting childhood to adulthood through the concept of a railway. After growing up, return to this place and re-examine the context here: the spiritual struggle caused by sacrificial investment in the examination-oriented education system to obtain a ticket to escape, and then try to escape the merit system to find individual expression and face material difficulties. You will find that this space landscape is like an iron cage. It is not that you don’t want to change or choose. Most people have no choice. They are either spiritual or material, and are trapped.
Environment Art: Seashore
Chenyu Lin: You mentioned that you want to escape poverty. How do you think poor artists should create in this era? Should they grit their teeth and continue to generate electricity for love, or make money first? Do you think poverty is making art or killing art?
Hui Zhong: Artists are usually considered "difficult to make money" in the current work system. This is a very realistic problem, right? But the poverty I mentioned is not a literal economic lack, but a kind of innate lack of human beings. Lack is a double-edged sword - because of the lack, we want to create, try to make up for it and pour out our emotions, so as to obtain a kind of spiritual self-liberation, but lack can also make people numb and desperate. If we explore art and poverty from an economic perspective, I think creators can deal with it more intelligently and in a more balanced way. It is not necessary to experience suffering to create, nor does it mean that a rich life will definitely give you freedom of expression. For artists, the more relaxed and natural they are in their art with a playful and researching mentality, the more they have the opportunity to get close to their inner artistic expectations. How to find opportunities as much as possible to ensure their persistence in creation, how to continuously improve their skills, thoughts and aesthetics are what should be paid more attention to. Flexibly, you can go to work, you can go off-duty, provided that you are not too nervous psychologically.
Chenyu Lin: Why did you choose to use UE5 for rendering?
Hui Zhong: At first, I used UE5 because it has strong real-time rendering, can be recorded directly, has low time cost, and is very powerful. After using UE5, I am a little uncomfortable with using Blender, because what you see is what you get, all physical properties, weather systems, etc., are like what is happening in front of your eyes. In addition, I also want to try to break through the boundaries of the media, combining the game perspective with the short video handheld shooting that is now all over the Internet every day, to confuse the perception boundary between reality and virtuality.
Environment Art: Metro
Chenyu Lin: Do you plan to make games in the future? What kind of game will you prepare to make with UE5? (Repeat)
Hui Zhong: I am currently preparing for my independent game. The theme of my previous graduation game was "escape". After completing it, I actually escaped, so I faced the question of "where to go after escaping". So I hope to use the next game to integrate memory, dreams and imagination to explore how the hometown in my desire exists? Is it a new dream, old memory fragments or a pure landscape that I have never seen? I am looking forward to the next exploration.
Chenyu Lin: Will this independent game be more realistic, or will it also have more imaginative pictures?
Hui Zhong: There will be a great deal of combination. I want to build a stagnant island that is lost in the cracks of time and space, starting from millennial culture. There are not too many dogmas and rules here. You can simulate life, roam, play, live, and even create. I am currently exploring some new visual media to create effects that are different from the previous hyper-realism. I expect this game to have many magical pictures.
INTERVIEWER: YUXUAN WEI
CURATOR: YUXUAN WEI, KE ZHANG
EDITOR: CHENYU LIN
GRAPHIC DESIGNER: YUXUAN WEI
Hui Zhong
Zhong Hui is a digital media artist with a background in architecture and creative media. She views artistic creation as a constructive act of escape from reality and a pursuit of freedom. By integrating the biological, the spatial, and virtual interaction, she continually reconstructs new perceptual structures, seeking an inhabitable otherworld through the mediums of games and animation.