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

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.

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.