Video game and city building: Liam Wong’s illustrated book “After Dark”. – Culture

Liam Wong is a video game designer by trade. This is what makes him so unique as a photographer, because his eye was not trained in art history or the masterpieces of photography, but in the virtual landscapes that he came up with as art director for computer games such as “Crysis” and “Far Cry”.

One night on a trip to Tokyo, he noticed that the Asian megacities look just like the urban landscapes in computer games. Which also has to do with the fact that for Wong, like for most game designers, the roots of his imagery lie in the cyberpunk aesthetic of the film “Blade Runner”. Its director Ridley Scott, on the other hand, imagined the future as Tokyo at night, with neon lights and car headlights reflected in the rain-soaked asphalt. This has often already petrified into cyber kitsch.

In Wong’s shots with the perspectives, image sections and motifs that are so clearly shaped by game worlds, this takes on a new quality again. After his first photo book “TO:KY:OO”, Wong has expanded his view for his new book “After Dark” to cities such as Kyoto, Osaka, Seoul and Chongquing. Even if Tokyo remains his dream destination, like above the picture of taxis in Shinjuku district. Because the big city, as the philosopher Christoph Quarch once put it, is for the people of the present what the forest was for the romantics. A place where they can lose themselves and then find them again.