Samuel Chan, Fog of war, 2025 concrete pavers, concrete bricks and hand-dyed paper, dimensions variable

Gallery 4

Fog of War

Samuel Chan

Fog of war is a military metaphor that has been adopted as a mechanic in strategy-map-based video games. It appears as a darkened foggy area around a player’s avatar or base, differentiating the unexplored from the explored territory on a map shared with hidden enemies. As the player navigates their surroundings, the fog recedes, gradually revealing more of their inhabited world. As well as a visual barrier, “fog of war” is designed to produce a sense of tension, anticipation, and unpredictability, a truth mediated through one’s immediate experience.

However, this unpredictability exists within a predetermined framework. The conditions that shape the player’s experience; the terrain, the obstacles and boons and the enemy’s positioning, were established when the map was generated. These conditions mirror a contemporary experience of living within and navigating our established systems and structures, those of which feel increasingly hostile and unstable, yet inescapable as they collapse in real-time.

Fog of war imagines this metaphor as a physical projection of this psychic state. A fractured grid of concrete pavers becomes a shifting ground of multiple planes, its order dissolving into gaps of rupture and dislocation. The landscape feels as if it is both dissolving and forming, a threshold space of becoming and unbecoming, suspended between cycles of growth and decay. The installation invites viewers to stand within its fragile topology and to feel its instability, while offering glimpses of something new taking root or perhaps the exposure of a long-hidden force.