A VIDEOGAME MADE OF BRICKS: AN XIATONG’S LEGO WORLDS
Beyond The Endgame - Nine Artists from Paris
September 26–November 14, 2026
Curated by Martina Köppel-Yang
229 Hamilton Avenue
Palo Alto, CA, 94301, US
From labyrinths to LEGO sculptures, the Chinese artist examines the visual conventions through which digital culture gives form to personal experience.
An Xiaotong’s Superheroes (2022) looks like a role-playing game paused in the middle of an encounter. Constructed from LEGO bricks, the series evokes the visual conventions of early videogame graphics, with figures whose simplified appearances suggest characters awaiting their next move. Three characters, the Child, the Demon and the Hero, recur across these compositions, inhabiting a world apparently governed by conflict and progression, friction and resolution. Yet the action remains suspended. There is no controller, no opportunity to test an alternative outcome. Viewers can inspect the construction of this imaginary world without being able to determine what happens within it.
The reference to video games appears explicitly in the curatorial documentation for Beyond the Endgame, the exhibition at Qualia Contemporary Art in Palo Alto, California, where An’s work is currently on view. Curated by Martina Köppel-Yang, the show brings together nine Paris-based artists of Chinese heritage whose practices address technological change and the possibility of acting within systems that appear to determine their outcomes. The exhibition documentation explains that Superheroes references the pixelated aesthetics of Undertale (2015), Toby Fox’scelebrated role-playing game. The comparison provides an unexpected entry into An’s sustained investigation of how images change through the process of remediation.
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