Eguo – Artist Statement

Eguo has consistently pursued the fusion of electronic music and visual expression since the beginning of their career. Their practice initially unfolded through live performances and video works, within which three recurring perspectives—multiperspective, meta perspective, and black humor perspective—have been embedded. These perspectives originate from a reality-shattering experience at the age of eighteen, an event that fundamentally altered Eguo’s perception of the world and continues to inform their artistic approach.

In recent years, Eguo has expanded their practice beyond conventional flat-screen displays by integrating VR and MR technologies, establishing an audiovisual expression grounded in bodily experience. By incorporating the participant’s active actions and performative gestures, Eguo seeks to further extend the domain of audiovisual expression, shifting it from passive observation toward embodied participation.

More recently, Eguo has introduced the form of the video game as a central framework, allowing multiperspective and meta perspective to be woven more deeply into the work. A resettable game mechanic equipped with continue and restart functions enables repeated cycles of life and death, through which innumerable player choices simulate multiperspective experiences. Furthermore, by allowing a game to emerge within a mixed-reality environment—forming a nested structure—players are guided into a meta perspective, where the fictional game world and the player’s lived reality intersect and become self-referential.

Through these approaches, Eguo explores philosophical implications drawn from the (self-)simulation hypothesis, Buddhist thought—particularly the Heart Sutra’s assertion that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” which holds that no phenomena possess fixed essence, and precisely because of this absence of fixed essence, all things come into being—and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Rather than being presented as abstract theories, these ideas arise through experiential structures that call into question the existence of fixed entities and the nature of reality itself.

Eguo also inherits and adapts the black humor perspective, extending from Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), into a contemporary context. Instead of instructing or moralizing, the work creates conditions in which viewers, through their own rational judgments and actions, unintentionally become conscious of humanity’s inherent ugliness and toxicity, giving rise to self-recognition. By applying the black humor perspective indiscriminately and in all directions, Eguo practices a freedom of expression that privileges no single position, functioning as a critical response to the rigidification of social systems driven by runaway righteousness.