Zheng Yuan

Hepingli Playthrough

Hepingli Playthrough features a fictional world that appears to derive from the recent past or the remote future. The video borrows aesthetics from text-based adventure games once popular in the 1990s. The given “playthrough” structure opens the possibilities of potential interaction between viewers and narrator, bringing together seemingly discrete moments to examine what options remain and what can be let go with the help of a built-in SAVE/LOAD system, wherein it makes visible the process of time travel, remembrance, and amnesia, resonating from crisis to banal, observation to engagement, a dystopia to the chance of a restart.