ACMI has announced it will host the installation of Feng Mengbo’s video game artwork Long March: Restart from 19 August until 21 January 2027, with visitors to the museum able to watch or play along with the interactive exhibit.
As shared, Long March: Restart is inspired by the historic Long March, a military retreat by the Chinese Red Army in the 1930s. Players will guide a Red Army soldier across two installed screens, charting a world inspired by classic video games Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter 2.
Players will fight with Coca-Cola cans, and face off with an array of supernatural enemies and pop culture figures across 14 levels, all inspired by real-world locations, retro video gaming, and science fiction hailing from the Cold War era.
When not being actively played, Long March: Restart will invite passive viewers on a guided journey.
Feng Mengbo’s Long March: Restart comes to ACMI – quick links
ACMI announces new interactive video game exhibit, Long March: Restart
‘Long March: Restart brings together videogame history, global screen culture and contemporary art,’ ACMI says. ‘By remixing communist and capitalist symbols, videogame references and national myth, Feng Mengbo asks how history is constructed, retold and replayed through the images and systems that surround us.’
Long March: Restart was first created in 2010, as a ‘backwards glance at video games within the history of global visual culture’ that also dealt ‘indirectly with the cultural and political history of China, and how this history has related to the West in the past.’
Feng’s work typically engages with history and culture in playful ways, with the nature of politics, pop culture, and the intersection of technology being particular fascinations.
Per ACMI, ‘Since the early 1990s, [Feng] has used video game aesthetics and software to revisit national history and contemporary life, often inserting himself or childhood heroes into game worlds. His practice spans painting, calligraphy, installation, photography, video, performance and interactive art.’
Since 2010, Long March: Restart has been on display at various museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in M+ in Hong Kong. It’s being made available in Melbourne for the first time, by donation of the M+ Sigg Collection.
As intended, it will be displayed alongside a single controller, designed to engage viewers in its colourful, dazzling world.
ACMI continues to lead the charge for preserving and displaying video games history
The arrival of Long March: Restart is another in a long line of curations centring video games as important facets of art, history, and culture.
Recently, ACMI hosted Game Worlds, a curated exhibit spotlighting the important history of video games and their global development. This included artefacts and knowledge of World of Warcraft, The Sims, Neopets, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and others.
In the past, it has also featured many art-focussed pieces exploring the nature of video games and their interactivity, including the memorable Out of Bounds: Exploring the Limits of Videogames, a temporary installation focussed on the outer limits of Red Dead Redemption 2, and how meaning can be created by exploring liminal spaces in games.
As ACMI says in its mission statement, video games remain an essential part of screen culture, and it will continue to curate with this important medium in mind.
‘Videogames are a global phenomenon with an estimated 3.31 billion people playing them worldwide,’ the museum says. ‘We explore this unique artform through the brightest local and international talents to deliver programming that resonates around the world.’
As well as spotlighting exhibits featuring the history and art of video games, ACMI has also been collecting video games for quite some time. It currently houses an array of Australian titles from the 1980s and 1990s, and it has pledged to continue preserving them in future.
‘At ACMI we believe videogames are an artform that demands celebration, preservation, exploration, and critique in a national museum.’
