Can you remember the last time you waited for someone without checking your phone?
Idleness has a texture; one we rarely feel anymore. Can I Touch You Through the Screen?, adapted from an essay by Zeng Hong and directed by Kinglun Yeung, connects five works from the M+ Collections and traces how, over the span of four decades, the devices designed to connect us began to keep us company instead.
In 1988, Nam June Paik’s Wrap Around the World beamed music and art to millions of viewers in a live satellite broadcast, somewhat hopefully suggesting that technology might unite the planet. Eight years later, Bandai’s Tamagotchi (1996) introduced a more personal digital bond. This pocket-sized pet needed feeding, care, and play. Along the way, it helped train a generation to form emotional attachments to electronic devices. Pak Sheung Chuen’s Waiting for a Friend (2006–2007) pushes against this tide. In this work, the artist waited hours at a Hong Kong MTR station, hoping to bump into someone he knew, a small act of faith that feels almost radical in our hyperconnected age.
Digital technology seems better than any human at meeting our desires tirelessly and without regrets.
Cheng Ran’s Simply Wild (2014) plunges into messier territory, building a Super 8 film around unsolicited email from a stranger—at once playful, desperate, and pushy—to evoke the disorientation of fabricated intimacy. Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ SAMSUNG (ENGLISH VERSION, VERSION 1) (1999) distils our modern-day malaise into a jazz-scored confession, in their signature flashing text, where a narrator finds salvation in neither a person nor a community, but rather in the idea of a corporation.
Threaded together by Yeung, these works trace a shift in sentiment from collective hope to private dependency, seeming to ask whether the screens that promised to bring us closer have quietly replaced us altogether.
About Cross-Cuts
Cross-Cuts is a video essay series from M+ that cuts across curatorial disciplines—visual art, moving image, and design and architecture—to draw unexpected connections between works in the museum’s collections. Each episode pairs a writer from outside of M+ with a video director, weaving objects together under a shared theme.