2³ or Not 2³: East Kowloon is on Minecraft

2³ or Not 2³ is a virtual art exhibition in the game world of Minecraft. Reflecting on the East Kowloon Cultural Centre’s opening in 2023, the exhibition reinterprets and embodies the cultural and historical elements of East Kowloon, featuring two newly commissioned Minecraft worlds created by Hong Kong artists Enoch Cheng and Lau Wai.

As the most popular video game ever made, Minecraft possesses tremendous creative potential for contemporary art, providing a 3D digital space with a short learning curve and user-friendly interface. In response to the synergy of this medium and the role of the theatre, Enoch Cheng carved out the negative space of the future East Kowloon Cultural Centre in a granite hilltop, and reconstructed a sanctuary filled with icons that symbolise the societal past of East Kowloon. The peculiar collage of social housing, woodland and endangered animals as historically inspired iconography forms an expansive virtual landscape. It establishes a journey through an ecosystem that envisions the future of the cultural, social and urban development at the site.

Treating the Minecraft world as a form of mise-en-scène in 3D, Lau Wai assembles a linear route of urban landscape with iconic movie scenes of East Kowloon from Hong Kong cinema in recent decades. The cinematic imagination of East Kowloon is captured and recomposed through the representational quality in the medium of film, providing a fictional extension of reality further represented by the digital materiality and gaming mechanism. Both artists materialise their reinterpretations of East Kowloon into virtual environments, in which the viewers are invited to freely explore the virtual spaces as immersive artworks within the game of Minecraft.

An augmented reality (AR) version is also presented as an extension beyond the Minecraft worlds. For viewers without the Minecraft game app, the web-based AR experience works on the viewer’s smartphone camera and web browser. Using an AR tracking marker, the viewer can experience the Minecraft artworks merged with their immediate surroundings, further materialising the reimagined essence of East Kowloon.

Kyle Chung