Mitchell F. Chan: Workers' Playtime Turns a Gallery Into a Rigged Arcade

Mitchell F. Chan opened Workers' Playtime at DE SARTHE in Hong Kong on October 10. It is his first solo exhibition in Asia, and it runs until November 21. The gallery has become a game center: 6 interactive sculptures built from electromechanical pinball parts, each in a thick, colourful shadowbox whose backdrop shows a different system of labour, from the open plan office and the factory to the farm, the home, the livestream and finance.

Every machine is rigged. In Cliffhangers, the flippers promise a game of skill, but a tiny gap keeps the ball from its target. In Daddy's Home, 2 pinballs roll toward each other on an inverted track and never meet. Roundtrippin', the finance piece, flips the logic: the ball keeps scoring in a closed loop while the player controls nothing. At the center of the room is a video game, a reimagined pinball machine that takes over as soon as you stop or win, and keeps playing without you. Chan started the sculptures in the autumn of 2025. "I think they're fresh, I think they're funny; I think they are a little bit heartbreaking," he wrote before the opening.

The show rests on years of thinking about games as an art form. In Categories of the Art Game, an essay Rhizome published on October 14 from his NEW INC Demo Day lecture at the New Museum, Chan borrows the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen's idea that a game designer works "in the medium of human agency," and argues that the art world's fixation on worldbuilding misses the point. He has also been posting a weekly sketch and minting each as a 1/1 on Ethereum, a run that passed 20 weeks in September with level designs for the exhibition's game. It is the chain where his Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, a token work after Yves Klein, was deployed in 2017.

For his 2 weeks in Hong Kong he was also the first artist in residence at a new digital art residency started by Jeannie Vu and Jehan Chu, which closed on October 17 with a conversation between Chan and Sunny Cheung, a curator at M+. The residency, he wrote, gave him a base while he opened the show and met the city's art scene.

Sources

• Mitchell F. Chan: Workers' Playtime, Hong Kong Art Gallery Association
• Categories of the Art Game, Mitchell F. Chan, Rhizome
• Mitchell F. Chan on X: Workers' Playtime announcement
• Mitchell F. Chan on X: installation shots at DE SARTHE
• Mitchell F. Chan on X: weekly sketch minted as a 1/1
• Mitchell F. Chan on X: the Hong Kong residency
• Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, GitHub