Kevin Peter He

Passage is a transmedia speculative ecology spanning game-engine simulation, live cinema performance, sculptural installation, and fragrance. The project asks: What remains “natural” in an age of planetary control and mediation? It constructs a forest in which organic life and machine infrastructure have become inseparable, functioning as a living circuit board. Metallic roots distribute energy; deer patrol the terrain as diagnostic agents; fans regulate heat; lightning recharges failing systems; and an artificial sun drives growth. Together, these processes generate a recursive cycle of accumulation, overheating, fire, storm, and renewal. The result is an engineered season whose stability depends on the same systems that repeatedly push it toward collapse.

Each manifestation of Passage offers a distinct way of encountering this ecology. In the live cinema performance Passage.Unfolding, the artist navigates the simulated forest through a sculptural camera instrument, producing an unbroken journey across one day in its life cycle. A musician scores the work live in response to changes in terrain, light, and camera movement. The installation Passage.SoftRains allows audiences to dwell within a sustained view of the forest, observing and subtly disturbing the behavior of its live-simulated deer. Passage.FallingLight distributes the ecosystem across four synchronized viewpoints, revealing changes unfolding throughout the forest over time. A physical hybrid tree anchors the installation’s virtual and material layers. The site-specific sculpture Passage.StillGrowth extends this logic into a New York City corporate lobby by grafting a synthetic prosthetic made of metal, resin, and concrete onto a living ficus tree whose growth has been pruned into ornament. Passage.ColdBloom translates the ecology into atmosphere. Composed from equal parts natural and synthetic ingredients, the fragrance opens with sunlit foliage before gradually revealing colder metallic notes.

Passage.exe distills the world into an objective-less exploration game. Moving from the forest floor to the canopy over the course of a simulated day, the player encounters no missions, enemies, scores, or fail states. Their actions are limited to navigation, framing, lighting, and observation. Gameplay becomes a quiet act of witnessing.

Across these forms, Passage uses world-building as a method for examining how environments are produced, perceived, and governed. Climate, computation, architecture, and living systems are already entangled through infrastructures of sensing, extraction, maintenance, and control. Within the simulated forest, phenomena that initially appear natural are gradually disclosed as the effects of artificial systems.

The project extends this structure into its own form. Its performances, simulations, installations, objects, and fragrance operate as interdependent expressions of a shared world, making Passage itself an ecosystem of partial viewpoints. No single manifestation contains the whole. Their accumulation asks how we might perceive and inhabit systems whose scale and distribution exceed any one perspective. Suspended between utopian promise and apocalyptic collapse, Passage holds growth and breakdown within the same cycle and presents transformation as an ongoing, unstable condition of being alive.

About the Artist

Kevin Peter He 何凯文 is a New York-based, Shanghai-raised artist and director working across performance, installation, and cinematic media. His live virtual cinema practice examines how systems of progress reshape perception, embodiment, and human connection.

He is a Collider Fellow at Lincoln Center and an artist member at Onassis ONX. He was previously a resident at NEW INC and ASU MIX Center, and served as Creative Director of the virtual production studio ZeroSpace. He holds a master’s degree from NYU ITP, where he also taught as an adjunct professor. His work has been performed, exhibited, and presented internationally at Lincoln Center, Southbank Centre, New Museum, Gray Area, MUTEK Montréal, Festival d'Avignon, USC School of Cinematic Arts, SXSW, Tribeca Festival, Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, Festival Internacional de la Imagen Bogotá, and elsewhere.