Fang is Gone, 2022
Listen to the songs here:
I’ll Love You When You’re Gone
Clouds, Winds and Rain
written by Nick Shengyu Yan and adapted by Yáng.
Hi, thank you for coming.
I was moving houses from my old place in Kensal to my new dig in Tower Hamlet.
When I was roaming the many road markets around East End, I came across this used wooden bureau. The top half is an angled slide board that can be opened downwards to form a writing platform.
When I opened it, I heard sound coming from inside that slide board. I asked the seller about this; they say there might be a hidden compartment somewhere.
And indeed, there was.
It was hidden under the board, a sliding compartment. When I pushed it open, a photo album dropped to the ground. It was in fairly good condition. I explored with my hands in the hidden space and found more objects, a pink bag, a black box, a glass case with a pair of sunglasses inside, a notebook and some letters.
Obviously, I couldn’t afford the bureau, but I got so curious that I asked the seller if I can have the things in the hidden compartment. After negotiation, we settled that these things would be sold as pieces of dead letters or old postcards.
The first thing I did after I came home with my newest conquests was to examine them. And I discovered them to be someone’s journal, or part of it. There are around a dozen entries, mixed up together with other stuff. And I took out all the pictures from the album to read if there’s anything written behind it.
Many of them were addressed to a person named Rickie L.. I don’t rightly know if the person has read them because I don’t know to whom that bureau used to belong.
There is an grandpa iphone in the pink bag as well. I charged it up and it was in a middle of a reset; followed by an automatic system update, most of the content was wiped clean. But some remained.
After going through these things, I wanted to share this person’s story.
So, here they are now.
Fang is Gone is a game where the players are presented with a box of objects which contains within them narratives. By investigating and rummaging through the objects, players discover more and more pieces of information and form their understanding of the memories behind these objects.
In the 20th century, championed by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, the concept of ‘ready-made art’ or ‘found art’ got prominent, as exemplified by Found Object in sculpture, Found Image in photography, and Found Sound in musical composition.
Meanwhile, modernist and post-modern writers were finding ways to challenge the linear structure of storytelling and question the relationship between the writer and the text/story (Roland Barthes, Michael Foucault).
In psychology, especially in object attachment theory, objects are viewed as a basis for identity and self-concept support. The acquisition and abandonment of objects indicates personal views and signals personality. While examining others’ objects, the examiner will form an opinion on the owner, and this forming of opinion in turn reflects on the value system of the examiner.
Inspired by the above, Fang is Gone by adopting a pseudo-found-object form allows the players to imagine the owner based on the material affected by their past experience and views.