Artist Statement: Advertising, Film & the Urgency of Myth Disruption
Before I built speculative futures, I directed commercials.
I spent years crafting seductive, high-gloss images designed to trigger desire, compliance, or divert boredom. I repeatedly walked the tightrope between answering my client's brief, and pushing a deeper cultural agenda, and I did this as a foreigner working in a supposedly restrictive environment of the PRC, based in Shanghai. My training is in the rhythm of persuasion—the camera language of consumer dreams. That experience has given me a fluency in the visual grammar of control: how image, sound, motion, and timing can be deployed to sell an idea, an identity, or a system.
01:30
YouTube
Rooibos Tea Fashion Film - Stunning South Africa
Capturing the natural beauty of South Africa, director Gary Yong films the famed Babylonstoren, one of the oldest and most historic Cape Dutch farms of the Western Cape, to introduce its Rooibos Tea to the Chinese public, where Rooibos has never before been widely marketed and sold. Production Company: DAO Marketing Exec Producer: Wallace Wang, DAO Marketing Director/Concept: Gary Yong -- Featuring: Yiting Sun -- Director of Photography/Drone Operator: John Feng Jing Director's Assistant/Beh
Marketing South African tea to the Chinese is a brief for selling ice to the Eskimos. This film uses cinematic serenity and atmospheric nature to re-enchant the unfamiliar—elevating a modest product into a mythic sensory journey, inviting emotional resonance with a foreign offering entering the Chinese market for the first time.
01:05
YouTube
Flying Dancer in a Silk T-shirt - Dance Film
Gary Yong directs commercial for Chinese menswear label K-Boxing 劲霸男装 pure silk series. Featuring dancer Nikola Tomasevic (IG:@tomnikbgd) Production Company: Stormshadow 雳影文化 Director/Executive Producer: Gary Yong Producer: Leslie Jin 金欣 Score/Sound Design: PHILJP DOP: John Feng 张松 Gaffer：Zhao Fei 赵生飞 Art Director: 杨婷
Choreographing contradiction—using fluid muscularity to rewire perceptions of masculinity through motion. The film sells softness as strength, inviting a new male archetype through expressive movement and the tactility of silk.
02:45
YouTube
Modern Beijing Opera MV - Pearl Beauty
Director Gary Yong updates the rich 18th century tradition of Beijing/Peking Opera, with a modern pop sensibility to promote Chinese beauty brand OSM's line of pearl powder skincare. Drawing comparisons between traditional and contemporary China, as a fashion allegory, the clip suggests the common road shared by both female avatars in their quest towards beauty and femininity in the 21st century. Track produced by French producer PHILJP combines traditional Chinese instruments guzheng 古筝, pipa
Tradition as interface—collapsing time through layered mise-en-scène and musical hybridity. This work remixes operatic iconography and sound with fashion allegory to visualize the convergence of Chinese ancestral culture and modern beauty tech—a proto-ritual in branded form.
11:24
YouTube
超高颜值Les微电影《如果花会说话》正片 | Rela
《如果花会说话》是基于“热拉直播”的应用而进行的影视拍摄项目。全球最大拉拉社交平台Rela热拉，旨在推广拉拉群体的精神世界，探秘女性之间最隐秘的内心世界。本片讲述了帅气女机车手与氧气美女花店老板娘擦出激烈的火花，姬情四射。 导演/监制：Gary Yong http://garyyong.com/ https://www.instagram.com/gary.yong/ ■□关注Rela app 官方帐号 Like us on ■□ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Relaapp Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/relaapp Rela热拉 官方网站: http://www.thel.co/en/home.html Download Rela下载链接：http://thel.co/download.html Rela 热拉(曾用名：the L热拉)是一款全球范围的拉拉交友app，也是中国第一款基于地理位置的les群体专属移动社交产品，2012年11月上线后在全球范围内广泛推广。 截止目前Rela 热拉有
My branded short for China’s first lesbian dating app portrayed same-sex romance without masculinizing either of its leads (rarely seen at the time in Chinese media), earning viral acclaim and praise from renowned sociologist/sexologist and gender studies pioneer Li Yinhe as “a first step to liberation for Chinese lesbians” in her published online essay. Banned by censors, the film resurfaced later on YouTube with 6M views.
ALGØFYRE™ (v.1117 – Private Beta) draws directly from that fluency—but turns it inward. It is a transmission disguised as an advertisement. It borrows the aesthetics of tech startups, luxury brands, and UX minimalism to stage a breach from within. I’m not rejecting the tools of commercial spectacle. I’m rerouting them. This work mimics the logic of an AI product launch not to sell a solution—but to reflect that we are already deep inside the problem.
We are entering an era where automated systems, predictive models, and synthetic attention economies are treated as part of the inevitable progress of civilization. That may be the logical extension to global order as narrated by a dying colonial, late capitalist system, but what is not inevitable is the mythic, godlike power we assign to them. We desperately need new origin stories—not authored by Silicon Valley or tech billionaires, but excavated from deep cultural memory, from shared ritual, from ancestral epistemologies.
In this work, fire becomes the metaphor and the methodology:
A primal algorithm.
An unpredictable, glitching product launch.
A cinematic interface that rewires attention economics,
instead of reinforcing instant gratification culture.
As a filmmaker now expanding into installation and spatial storytelling to articulate my vision of spiritual techno-philosophy, I am actively developing my first long-form science-fiction called ARTifacts of the Future—a worldbuilding framework in which alternate AI philosophies, mythic technologies, and resistance rituals are staged across cinema, multimedia installations, and poetic transmedia formats.
ALGØFYRE™ is not just one of my first installations. It is the first leak.
A signal dressed as a system.
A loose spark inside the machine.
A signal dressed as a system.
A loose spark inside the machine.
ALGØFYRE™ (v.1117 – Private Beta) is the first public manifestation of a larger, ongoing speculative worldbuilding project titled ARTifacts of the Future. This IP unfolds through a series of installations, films, and conceptual technologies that explore an alternate techno-spiritual philosophy shaped by a future civilization known as the Creator Underground.
ALGØFYRE™ seeds the curatorial logic for the full ARTifacts triptych proposal planned for the Malta Biennale and other exhibitions in 2026, where three interconnected works - including the proposed Lux Venditor and The God is in the Gate - will stage a techno-philosophical system through the reimagining of image, interface, and ritual. Each work represents a distinct mode of mythic resistance within the Creator world.
Lux Venditor is a cinematic light shrine disguised as a retrofitted vending machine—offering warmth, memory, and poetic code in place of products. It reclaims the transactional object and converts it into a ritual interface for mourning and transformation.
Under consideration for Copenhagen Festival of Light 2026.
Conceptual drawing
AI-generated visualization
The God is in the Gate presents a deconstructed temple of cinema: a Balinese-inspired AI shrine oracle that speaks only in fragments of cinematic memory through a poetic AI engine. It asks visitors to kneel before the sacred absence of the screen between the shrine gates, and through language offerings, and shared mourning, eulogize an extinct 'God of Cinema' in a post-cinema civilization.
Under consideration for Art and Bali 2025.
Conceptual drawing
AI-generated visualization
Together, the triptych unpacks a radical techno-philosophy through primitive visual sense-making: that in a future saturated with consciousness-hijacking algorithmic spectacle, resistance will come not through advanced technology operating alone in a supposed vacuum, but through an ancestral code - a cosmotechnic inheritance that reprograms the interface of the soul.
AI-generated visualization
Conceptual Framework of ALGØFYRE™ v.1117 – Private Beta
ALGØFYRE™ is a creative intervention in our dysfunctional attention economy, masquerading as a teaser campaign for a cognitive optimization tech by the fictional conglomerate ONTI Group (from the ARTifacts universe). A towering photorealistic Trojan Horse burning slowly, approaches the window plane as the sole object in a time-based loop. As it makes contact with the window threshold, it rams into the glass, as though wanting to break out of its cage.
The installation invites viewers to gaze into digital fire, evoking both the earliest storytelling rituals and a reversal of the algorithmic attention traps of the present. As the flames intensify, the viewer is made complicit in their own expectation for spectacle. Just as the moment of revelation nears, the horse flickers away—exposing its unreality. A final message copy appears, providing a clue to diciphering this spectacle.
The installation invites viewers to gaze into digital fire, evoking both the earliest storytelling rituals and a reversal of the algorithmic attention traps of the present. As the flames intensify, the viewer is made complicit in their own expectation for spectacle. Just as the moment of revelation nears, the horse flickers away—exposing its unreality. A final message copy appears, providing a clue to diciphering this spectacle.
AI-generated visualization
A Gaze Restored
In a world trained to look down—into feeds, into frictionless scrolls—ALGØFYRE™ compels a reversal. It stages a confrontation not with information, but with presence. The burning Trojan Horse stands not as spectacle, but as an ancient emissary—summoning the viewer to look up, face forward, and return the gaze of myth itself.
“To meet the fire’s gaze is to remember how to see.”
Firegazing as attention hacking ritual
At its core is the act of firegazing: one of the earliest human storytelling rituals. Physiologically, firegazing slows the heartbeat, lowers cortisol levels, and induces a meditative state. Psychologically and socially, it fosters patience, communal attention, and the soft dissolution of ego. Unlike algorithmic interfaces that demand constant reaction, fire invites stillness, interiority, and remembrance.
This installation translates firegazing into digital form, using a universally recognizable childhood myth, to narrate a simple fable. Gradually advancing towards the window as the blaze appears out of control, it transforms the installation from a passive mythic tableau into a narrative-driven, slow-burn cinematic assault on the viewer’s reality and attention span.
It is not a sculpture, but a transmission. Not a display, but a disruption.
It asks: what happens when fire, the first medium of collective imagination, returns to the feed?
STORYBOARD SEQUENCE Approx. duration: 5 minutes
FABRICATION APPROACH
Installation Fabrication Components (Details)
🔧 STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE HOLOGAUZE VISIBILITY
12. QR CODE → MICROSITE
“Is this a viral AI product launch, a fake teaser, or an art project? Can it be all of the above?”
“Does the public know it’s art—or is the art what they discover after their attention has already been hacked?”
“If it’s a product—what does it promise? If it’s a glitch—where does it lead?”
“Does the public know it’s art—or is the art what they discover after their attention has already been hacked?”
“If it’s a product—what does it promise? If it’s a glitch—where does it lead?”
Scanning the QR should not immediately reveal it’s an art piece—instead, it mimics a product site in flux, or a launch site that’s been corrupted.
Intentional instability—the installation works because it never lands fully on one explanation. Through repeated viewings or deeper interactions, the public has a chance to experience the varied tone of its intentional ambiguity, and its implications.
The microsite will link to more information about the ARTifacts universe-in-progress, and provide a link to sign up for future updates and to engage on social media.