In Hong Kong artist’s cyberpunk dystopia, China’s ‘First Emperor’ rules a future techno-dictatorship. His vision inspires a San Francisco exhibition

Hong Kong artist known as Kongkee shows a cyberpunk vision of Chinese history in show at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, and a twisted view of the future

Pilots for a film in which Chinese emperor Qin Shihuang finds the elixir of life and rules a futuristic world show alongside video of Hong Kong icons swept away

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Detail from a poster for “Dragon’s Delusion - Departure” (2017), a pilot that artist Kongkee produced for a full-length feature film about a future world ruled by an immortal Qin Shihuang, the so-called First Emperor of China. The film features in his Asian Art Museum show. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Penguin Lab

Published: 7:15am, 19 Dec 2022

In September, Kong Hong-chuen (also known as Kongkee) got lucky. Thanks to the sour state of Sino-US relations, the artist was asked by a major San Francisco museum to replace a postponed exhibition from China with his own show based on a Hong Kong-inspired revisionist Chinese history.

That, in itself, is a symbol of Hong Kong’s traditional role as an intermediary between East and West.

“Warring States Cyberpunk”, which took just two months to put together at the Asian Art Museum, is also an advertisement for Hong Kong’s famous efficiency.

Notwithstanding Kong’s adoption of visual clichés such as neon signs, the Star Ferry and tong lau tenement buildings, this impressive show creates the potential for the city to be read as a new kind of cultural symbol – one suited to a sci-fi genre known as Asian futurism which challenges our understanding of technology and progress.

The indefinitely postponed “Lost Kingdoms of Ancient China” would have filled the museum’s new 8,500 sq ft (790 square metre) Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Pavilion with around 150 bronze age objects from five Chinese museums.

The exhibition was going to be about the phoenix-worshipping Zeng and Chu kingdoms that existed in the messy, war-torn era before Qin Shihuang, ruler of the Qin kingdom, defeated his regional rivals and declared himself the First Emperor in 221 BCE – a period which Kong happens to be fascinated by.