Violent West Lake

Violent West Lake brought fourteen artist collectives together around a card game that unfolded over the course of a month.

The game became a shared structure for the groups to meet, play, challenge one another, and keep returning to questions of coexistence. Elements, tensions, and strange presences found around West Lake were turned into cards and spirits within the game, carrying frictions between human and nonhuman life, natural and engineered landscapes, and different ways of inhabiting the same place.

At the same time, each collective was asked to look inward. Through play, groups encountered the hidden frictions inside their own ways of working together, and tested what other forms of collective life might be possible. Positions shifted, crossed, and became contaminated by one another as the game continued.

The project moved constantly between these two scales: the ecology of West Lake and the ecology of collective being.

_ao_ao_ing coordinated the project, developed the card game, curated the exhibition and publication, and also participated as one of the fourteen groups.