The featured artist for the “On Gaming” Community Anthology is Isabel Li. Below is their artist statement, intermixed with the images that you’ll find on the top of the pieces in this anthology.
In the early 2010’s, I spent my school days in anticipation of the two hours I’d been permitted at the family PC at the end of the week. These were the days I spent, sure, playing Tetris with my sister on Facebook and adopting virtual pets of various made-up species, but also gradually drinking in the most I could then about the wider world, or what lay outside of swirls of Auckland suburbs, shaded sidewalks. These windows to the rest of humanity nestled in forum posts and websites gradually wandered away from the purely ludic and became something of a trellis as I learned how to find myself online.
Making art that concerns digital spaces and experiences then is nothing new to me—in the era of Oekaki bulletin boards and deviantArt, online community and pixel canvasses were always intimately guiding (or just heavy-handedly informing) my practice. When I first started discovering my artistic voice, my visual work gravitated towards both criticisms and celebrations of the web’s connectivity, ubiquitous icons inter-spliced with the real and soft. I borrow and steal familiar user interfaces, superimposed upon hyper-realistic surfaces; cursors like decals dance around subjects with glassy, high-resolution eyes who at least masquerade as three-dimensional.
It’s a finicky task sometimes, to interrogate the visual representation of an experience that is so mentally impacting, yet largely consists of the simultaneous blandness and over-saturation of flipping between screens for hours. Some nights, usually on the eve of submission deadlines, I dream within the confines of my sixteen-inch screen, mouse-scrolling and clicking in my sleep. Other days, when asked what I did the day before, my mind draws blank, any brain activity consumed like yesterday’s bitter laptop battery and fading to modular blacks with the shutdown sequence at dusk. Even in memory the immaterial space entangles, clips through my feelings and thoughts that drive my movement in the material world.
Gaming, of course, like the internet, like any other playground or plaything, is shiny and reflective and identity-forming. I was excited to create a companion piece for this anthology given my coming-of-age within digital worlds, but also nervous—not necessarily about the execution, but rather how the work might demand some justification in my self-identifying as a gamer. My history of gaming fell wayward towards games that are not so traditionally classified as “video games”: customising web-based avatars, collecting fantastical pets and gilded items—all the fun focused in personalisation and curation. In private, I can argue for these preferences as queer in their taste-making habits and self-definition; in group conversations, I am meek about having drawn fan-art for but never actually having touched Breath of the Wild.
And reading over the anthology drafts, they do supply such a litany of titles I either don’t recognise or perhaps read the Wikipedia plot summary for after resigning to the idea I’ll never play the game. But they also ring familiar and bright in the ways games have held me through this life. Some of these works refashion violence and conquest, pointed inwards or at the colonial oppressor, to become seductive emblems of agency and power.
As I sketched it out, I wanted violet eyes to pierce like Avery Robinson’s “Sharpen / your mouth for the howling”, to discover, almost snarl, in Bree Gwin’s words: “To be my own hero and my only hope—the light in my own black eyes, the strength in my bare hands, the power in my Voice?” Between the catharsis of these impenetrable armours, the imagined immunity of machinery and metal — DeeSoul Carson’s “a voice /bade me /solve, / and so I became the /6D 61 63 68 69 6E 65 any deity would be / proud of” — whirrs discs and crackles wires, prints plastic moulded controller casings across the canvas. As a cyborg-infested sci-fi enthusiast always in negotiation with their own body, I like finding ways to portray alternative embodiments, eclipsing appendages with shields and screens. Stephanie Dinsae’s “knight from Queens or Brooklyn depending on what you’re willing to / let into your imagination” clears the canvas for new modes of operation between flesh and a more forgiving, expansive world, but perhaps also locked permissions, hands and faces boxed in.
I am moved back towards spots of vibrance and warmth, coming across Marlin M. Jenkins’ “The character and the self blended […] because the characters would become part of you—something and someone more.” It takes me again to my childhood spent in the walk-in closet of the character customisation screen, still humming and waiting to be built up. Staring at my file layers as suspensive graphics blend and gaussian blur into tacky corporeal hand-held controllers (my emotional churning washing into the tide of the desktop bar, the scratched monitor edge that had been invisible until just now) I wander back to Chanlee Luu’s “I’m so lost in this game, I’m confusing lives.” The final work is swept in a deep purple, in the way that gaming sometimes feels like guilty pleasure eaten away at by LED glow. The right-hand side of the composition settles into a quiet comfort. As I render the final figure, mav’s “Maybe she could not find the words for please don’t go, but she knew this was a safe place for me to stay” floats and staggers.
As I wrapped up this illustration, I accompanied my partner home to Christmas with his family after becoming unexpectedly estranged from my own. It was a strange experience; I’m used to quiet dinners and having more than just a nook or cranny to myself. When we were scrolling through the wishlist spreadsheet, filled with columns of gift for three times the number of people in my family, I was surprised to see the number of video games requested. Games for me were a private and vulnerable endeavour, too revealing about my true desires, foot pressed flat against the power button at all times should someone walk in. Even more unexpected to me then was the nightly transformation of the living room into a place for party games, cards, lazing about as we thumbed through every possible game on the big screen and poked at Nintendo’s Shogi or Ludo. During the making of this piece my relationship with games has twisted and turned, shed old skins, and yet always found a way towards queer joy. In the shy competition of new laughter and the controller clutched too tight, I found another place to feel safe.
