The Game: The Connection Between Life and Life
AAF
I. The Game: A Space Beyond the Boundaries of Species
Play is among the earliest forms through which human beings establish social relationships. It precedes many established social conventions and even complex systems of language. Through play, individuals come to recognize others through movement, response, pursuit, cooperation, and competition, gradually forming connections through shared participation.
But when play extends beyond human activity, when animals enter its field, and when different forms of life are no longer positioned in opposition to one another, a different way of seeing begins to emerge.
DALONG WANG’s large-scale bronze sculpture theGame (2010) begins with an apparently familiar scene, opening it into an inquiry into the relationships between forms of life.
The work consists of two bears and three children. Its setting draws upon the traditional children's game of "Eagle Catches the Chicks," in which children pursue and evade one another, forming a dynamic structure of movement and interaction. Here, however, the bears also become participants in the game.
The mother bear protects her cub, while the father bear takes part in the pursuit. The children and bears form a dynamic scene of pursuit, defense, and response.
What is most significant about this arrangement is not the anthropomorphization of animals, nor the simple juxtaposition of humans and animals for visual effect. Rather, the work alters the conventional terms through which the relationship between humans and animals is perceived.
In traditional visual experience, human beings often occupy the position of observer, controller, or narrative subject, while animals appear as objects of observation. theGame temporarily disrupts this hierarchy. Humans and animals enter a shared field of action, becoming participants in one another's activities.
They are no longer merely representatives of two distinct species, but individual beings engaged in a common experience.
Play becomes a language that crosses the boundaries between species.
II. From the Rules of Play to the Connection Between Life and Life
Play is possible because connections exist among its participants.
Pursuit requires response. Evasion requires perception. Protection requires someone or something to be protected. The continuation of play depends upon an ongoing exchange of actions and reactions.
These behaviors constitute the basic conditions of play, while also revealing a more fundamental relationship between living beings: the actions of one life become conditions for the actions of another.
This may be where the deeper significance of theGame resides.
The work does not attempt to tell viewers how they should understand humanity's relationship with nature. Nor does it assign the bears and children the roles of abstract symbols. Instead, it adopts a more immediate approach: placing different forms of life within a specific shared activity.
In this process, the boundaries between humans and animals do not disappear, but neither do those boundaries necessarily imply separation.
This allows the work's notion of Connection to extend beyond the conventional understanding of interpersonal relationships.
It points toward a connection between life and life: between human beings, between humans and animals, and between humanity and the natural world. It encompasses mutual perception, response, and coexistence among different forms of life.
Such connection is not an externally imposed moral proposition. It emerges through the activities of life itself.
The work therefore does not present nature as an abstract object that humanity must protect, nor does it reduce animals to projections of human emotion. Instead, it presents a world in which different forms of life can coexist and participate together.
III. Bronze: The Encounter Between Transient Action and Time
theGame takes the form of a large-scale bronze group sculpture, rising to a height of more than two meters.
Bronze has a long and significant history in sculpture. It allows complex bodily structures and gestures to be preserved, giving transient forms of movement a relatively enduring material existence.
Yet in this work, the significance of bronze extends beyond scale, technique, or monumentality.
Play itself is a transient activity.
Pursuit, evasion, protection, and response all unfold within continuously changing time. They have no predetermined conclusion and require no permanently fixed posture. The vitality of play lies precisely in the continuation and transformation of movement.
Bronze, in turn, arrests this dynamic process.
An intriguing temporal relationship emerges: fleeting actions are preserved in a lasting material form, while viewers, encountering the sculpture, reactivate these movements through their own imagination.
The sculpture does not physically move, yet the relationships it preserves remain dynamic.
This gives the work a temporal dimension that exceeds static form. What viewers encounter is not simply a story that has already ended, but a scene of play that can still be perceived, imagined, and entered anew.
IV. Shared Experience in Public Space
theGame was not conceived solely for the enclosed environment of a gallery.
Since 2014, the work has appeared in a number of different settings, including the LA Art Show, public spaces in West Hollywood, Grand Park in Los Angeles, and subsequently the open environment of Eddy Farm.
Unlike traditional commemorative sculpture, which often centers on historical figures, events, or prescribed collective values, theGame does not require viewers to accept a predetermined historical narrative.
Instead, it offers an open situation.
Children may recognize a familiar game. Adults may recall their own childhood experiences. Other viewers may discover an unfamiliar sense of intimacy between humans and animals through their shared participation in the scene.
Viewers of different ages, cultural backgrounds, and personal experiences can find different points of entry into the same work.
This is one of the reasons for the work's particular relevance to public space.
It does not depend upon elaborate textual explanations, nor does it require specialized knowledge of art. It establishes connections through the experience of bodies, movement, and emotion.
Public art here is not merely a visual addition to public space. It becomes a medium through which different individuals can share an experience.
V. Emotion as a Form of Life Asset
In contemporary society, the importance of things is frequently measured through economic value, social status, and material possession.
Yet certain dimensions of human existence cannot be adequately understood through these measures.
Trust between individuals, intimacy between humans and animals, protection and responsiveness within a group, and the spontaneous emotional connections that arise between different forms of life all constitute indispensable aspects of existence.
These relationships may be understood as a form of emotional asset.
They are not material possessions that can simply be owned or exchanged. Nevertheless, they continually influence how individuals perceive the world, relate to others, and understand their own existence.
theGame transforms these difficult-to-quantify emotional relationships into a sculptural situation that can be experienced collectively.
Significantly, the work does not directly depict sentimental emotion, nor does it manufacture feeling through theatrical conflict. Instead, emotion exists within the relationships and actions among its participants.
The mother bear's protection, the father bear's pursuit, the children's responses, and the interaction of the group as a whole allow emotion to emerge not merely as an internal psychological state, but as a connection perceptible between living beings.
In this sense, the work is not simply about the happiness generated by play. It is concerned with the conditions that make such happiness possible: the possibility that life can respond to life.
VI. Beyond the Game: Rethinking Coexistence
Ultimately, the questions raised by theGame extend far beyond play itself.
When humanity no longer regards itself as the sole center of the natural world, when animals are no longer viewed merely as objects to be observed, managed, or exploited, and when different forms of life are allowed to exist within the same world in their own ways, might the relationship between humanity and the world be understood differently?
The work offers no definitive answer.
It does not idealize coexistence as a world without differences or conflicts. Different forms of life retain their own behaviors, instincts, and modes of survival. Their connection does not require them to become identical.
What matters is that difference does not necessarily lead to separation.
Play provides a shared space in which different forms of life can participate, while sculpture preserves this possibility in material form.
Thus, theGame is neither a story about humanity's conquest of nature nor a simple allegory of harmony between animals and children. It is closer to an observation of the commonality of life: across different forms, instincts, and modes of existence, the possibility of connection remains.
Such connection does not require the elimination of difference, nor does it need to be imposed through an external order. It can emerge naturally from the most fundamental activities of life.
Play thereby becomes a way of understanding relationships between living beings.
What the sculpture preserves is not merely a fleeting moment of a game, but a possibility: that life can connect with life and exist together.
theGame does not attempt to provide the world with a grand answer. It begins with a simple and familiar scene of play, yet allows that scene to contain an experience of life extending beyond humanity itself.
When play becomes an activity shared by different forms of life, it is no longer merely a childhood memory or a form of entertainment within human culture.
It becomes a metaphor for connection, an experience of coexistence, and a possibility for rethinking humanity's relationship with the world.
Life does not exist in isolation. Its meaning continues to unfold through its connections with other forms of life.
Publication ID: AAF-PUB-TG-2026-001
Published: 2026
Published by: AAF