Lau Wai has a knack for making serious points with comedic flair.<\/p>\n
For the 2017 series \u201cProfile Picture\u201d, 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\u2019s outsized influence on gender roles for Lau\u2019s generation.<\/p>\n
Lau\u2019s 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 \u2013 tools the artist mastered over the past six years in New York \u2013 and is scaled up both in size and the breadth of the topics tackled.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat if we\u2019re 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?\u201d Lau asks, not quite hypothetically, at the Hong Kong Design Institute, where their 14-minute short film, titled W.A.I. \u2013 The Cast of the Invisible<\/em>, is being screened.<\/p>\n 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 doppelg\u00e4ngers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/img.i-scmp.com\/cdn-cgi\/image\/fit=contain,width=1024,format=auto\/sites\/default\/files\/d8\/images\/canvas\/2026\/01\/02\/7991f3ba-bf5a-4077-8619-adc22cb9ef28_47000465.jpg\" "\\"A")
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