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The City of Willows
by Chong Yan Chuah and Simon Soon
Curated by Deborah Lim
Artist Chong Yan Chuah and scholar Simon Soon have collaborated to create The City of Willows (2025), an ornate video game that reimagines the elaborate rituals of Chinese secret societies or Triads that flourished in the Malay Archipelago during the 19th century.
Rooted in histories of mutual aid and brotherhood amongst Chinese migrants, the game transforms the traditional Triad initiation ceremony into a cosmological map. Players embark on a mythic journey through a dense jungle landscape, encountering Southeast Asian scenes along the way—such as durian stalls and a seven-storey pagoda recalling Penang’s Kek Lok Si Temple, with its famed ‘Pagoda of Ten Thousand Buddhas’. Stages reached in the game mirror locations referenced in the initiation ceremony and folklore. These portals include the Hung (or Ang) Gate, the Hall of Fidelity and Loyalty, the Market of Universal Peace and the Red Flower Pavilion. The quest is ultimately to reach the fabled City of Willows, a symbolic sanctuary where belonging and community are embodied.
At present, the merging of tangible and intangible, reality and virtual reality, feels ever closer. If Triads once offered refuge for Chinese migrants, in a dystopian future, the City of Willows might serve as a post-apocalyptic haven. Game worlds and technology could even open up pathways to truer expressions of imagination and emotion. Chong Yan Chuah expands this thought with the Geneacosm Index (2023, 2025), a series of speculative Peranakan futures through the lens of machine vision. The index comprises 113 eerie and uncanny portraits bearing traces of cultural memory while eliciting more questions than answers. There is also a disembodied voice declaring fragments of presence and absence, of history and mythology. All these remnants invite reflection and further dreaming, dissolving the boundaries between past, present, and futures yet to be imagined.
The City of Willows (2025) was commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. The exhibition forms the second part of a two-part show that was first presented in conjunction with George Town Festival 2025 in August.
Exhibition Dates: October 11th – December 7th 2025, every Friday to Sunday 12pm – 7pm.
Private View:Â 5pm-7pm, October 10th
Opening Party:Â 10pm, October 11th
Artist Dialogue:Â 2pm, October 12th
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