Prosperity or Emptiness, 2022, Xi Li 李曦

2022 /2K QHD Video/ 2560x1440/ 05'01"

Prosperity or Emptiness is a moving-image work commissioned by Circuit Artist Moving Image Aotearoa New Zealand and Wellington City Council for Masons Screen (2022). Through digitally constructed landscapes, the work imagines a speculative environment where nature, architecture, ritual, and technology dissolve into one another, questioning the shifting relationship between ecological systems and contemporary urban life.

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Animated through a series of 3D environments, the work constructs a world populated by vascular-like branches, ritual structures, monumental skulls, mysterious totems, and fortress-like architectures. These hybrid forms blur distinctions between organic and artificial, living and constructed, transforming the landscape into a symbolic ecology suspended between growth and decay.

Rather than opposing nature and the city, Prosperity or Emptiness presents both as interconnected systems continuously reshaped by technological mediation and cultural imagination. The work reflects on how digital environments reconfigure our understanding of landscape, embodiment, and the experience of place, where prosperity and emptiness become inseparable conditions of contemporary existence.

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Presented continuously on Masons Screen from December 2022 to February 2023, the work became embedded within the rhythms of Wellington’s public space. Visible day and night, its slow-moving landscapes unfolded alongside the movement of pedestrians and the city itself, allowing the speculative world of the work to momentarily coexist with everyday urban experience.