Chonghao Hua's Dystopian Videos Critique Capitalism and Surveillance

Key facts

• Chonghao Hua creates moving images and performances that dissect capitalist environments and the eradication of individuality.
• Self in Alienation (2025) uses an amusement park setting where faceless suited figures play games that are actually tasks contributing to a timer.
• In Self in Alienation, a figure reaching 100 passes through a celebratory doorway only to find a mass grave of past 'winners'.
• Burnout Current (2025) depicts a futuristic workshop where self-manufacturing robots dominate and the only human worker wears an orange uniform and relies on an oxygen tank.
• In Burnout Current, the human protagonist maintains a robotic arm, symbolizing industrial control and technological superiority over humans.
• Attention Capital in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2025) features four figures interacting with a digital mirror; identical subject IDs suggest they are the same person in different guises.
• A green 'standard issue' human has a 74% optimization level, a yellow version resembles a social media celebrity with attention metrics, a pink version is a 'replacement candidate', and a blue version faces a screen reading 'You have nothing to hide. We checked.'
• The second part of Attention Capital places the incarnations on scales with an all-seeing eye, representing mass surveillance and a controlled digital environment where authenticity is erased by algorithm shifts.