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Chloe Loung

Lau Wai has a knack for making serious points with comedic flair.
For the 2017 series “Profile Picture”, the Hong Kong artist, who uses they/them pronouns, superimposed features from Japanese sci-fi anime characters on their own blurred headshots as a humorous reference to the genre’s outsized influence on gender roles for Lau’s generation.
In 2018’s “The Memories of Tomorrow”, Lau reconstructed 20th-century Hollywood depictions of Hong Kong with jarring, futuristic elements to highlight the staged nature of familiar settings.
Lau’s latest work harks back to that earlier interest in the construction of identity, but it has been made with the help of CGI animation and motion capture technology – tools the artist mastered over the past six years in New York – and is scaled up both in size and the breadth of the topics tackled.
“What if we’re replaced by our digital replicas? What if our digital identities take over our physical identities? How are we told what we should do by those products?” Lau asks, not quite hypothetically, at the Hong Kong Design Institute, where their 14-minute short film, titled W.A.I. – The Cast of the Invisible, is being screened.

The animation is slapstick, and the use of Cantonese dialogue makes it especially relatable to the home audience. It stars a scanned, 3D version of Lau as W.A.I., who finds out that they have been cloned many times over and experiences an existential meltdown upon meeting their doppelgängers.
W.A.I. is a motion-capture (mocap) actor, a performer who digitally records movements, expressions and emotions, wearing special suits with markers that cameras track to animate computer-generated characters. This is a job that captures the false sense of control we all have, according to Lau.
“I came across these short clips of motion-capture actors performing behind the scenes, and I thought it was f*****g ridiculous,” Lau says. “They were dressed in those suits and acting in front of a green screen without anyone else around them.
“You don’t know what they’re doing, and it’s not until you see the end product that you realise, ‘Oh, they were the person who was performing behind that gorilla, or that cartoon character.’
“They are the ones actually performing and controlling all these characters, but in the end, no one will see their actual faces.”
One issue that the film highlights is how capitalism exploits even the virtual world, with the erasure of W.A.I’s identity by digital AI avatars simply a logical next step, the film gloomily suggests.












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Trapped in a profession that strips away individuality, W.A.I. is unable to escape the fact that their only purpose is to perform as someone else. The ever-present suit, worn even in private, illustrates the static nature of such a strangely ambiguous identity.
“[These actors] symbolise the idea of being both ‘in between’ the real and virtual worlds yet never fully present or autonomous in either one,” Lau says. “It’s a facade. You will never be in control of what other people could see of you or from you.”
These anxieties define the contemporary moment: a generation hurtling forward on a technological treadmill it can scarcely control.
W.A.I. – The Cast of the Invisible is part of “Pluriversal Futures”, an exhibition at the Hong Kong Design Institute that runs until April and features several works that have won prizes at Austria’s Prix Ars Electronica, the world’s longest-running media art competition.
Media art and transmedia specialist Joel Kwong, a member of the curatorial team, says Lau’s works are part of an “inescapable” global trend surrounding new media technologies in the art space.
“Technology is part of everyone’s lives nowadays,” Kwong says. “You have multiple identities on different platforms – on social media, in chat rooms, in physical space – on top of our own identity.”
But Lau’s work is also about Hong Kong’s background and Lau’s own, showing a struggle with cultural and racial identity and how that introspection – and technology – has transformed over the years.
“I was born and raised in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s, and to be honest, I didn’t really like it,” Lau says. “I feel very differently now after growing up, but at that time, I wanted to escape.”

Being queer and the child of mainland Chinese migrants living in Hong Kong before and after the city’s return to Chinese sovereignty, Lau grew up “asking a lot of questions” and later studied and worked in London and New York.
“I started to look into all this European and American culture and I was super, super, white-centric.”
Once abroad, Lau began to recognise the stereotypes they were being subjected to.
“I wasn’t part of the majority any more. I was always being seen as this Asian little girl who was submissive, with this sort of quiet obedience expected of me.
“I just remember constantly thinking, ‘Why would they have all these ideas that I have no idea about? Where does that come from? I feel like [those perceptions have] nothing to do with me. How can they see that in me?”
Those thoughts shaped Lau’s interest in how digital, social and physical realities merge, and their work in the past decade has clearly resonated with different audiences, having been shown at the Power Station of Art museum in Shanghai, the Yokohama Triennale in Japan, the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung foundation in Munich, Germany, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in the United States, to name a few.
In Hong Kong, Lau has presented solo and group exhibitions at Para Site and Tai Kwun Contemporary, while their work is also featured in the M+ museum’s permanent collection.
Lau returned to Hong Kong in 2025, after graduating from Columbia University in New York with a master’s degree in fine arts in 2020 and then teaching at The City University of New York. The artist plans to explore the intersection of personal archives, cinematic tropes and the virtual world.
“I want to elaborate on the different roles or characters we have to take on or even perform in our everyday lives willingly or unwillingly, all the while searching for the roles we actually want.
“And with the rise of technology, those conversations just get more difficult.”
“Pluriversal Futures – A Prix Ars Electronica Exhibition”, HKDI Gallery, Hong Kong Design Institute, 3 King Ling Road, Tseung Kwan O, Wednesday-Monday (closed Tuesday), 10am-8pm. Until April 6. Free admission.


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Digital art pioneer Lau Wai explores identity and technology in a short-film screening at the Hong Kong Design Institute


Digital art pioneer Lau Wai explores identity and technology in a short-film screening at the Hong Kong Design Institute.


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Hong Kong artist Lau Wai’s digital clones spark identity crisis in new exhibition

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Digital art pioneer Lau Wai explores identity and technology in a short-film screening at the Hong Kong Design Institute

Digital art pioneer Lau Wai explores identity and technology in a short-film screening at the Hong Kong Design Institute