The Grey Brick is an interactive game installation that reimagines bricks as emotional artifacts, carrying traces of urban history and intergenerational memory. The software simulates a nighttime construction site transformed into a playhouse made of plain bricks. The player appears as a ghostly shadow hand and a cherished hammer, playing make-believe with the bricks while holding and cracking them into surreal remains.

Based on the oral history of 1950s Beijing, when the old city walls were demolished, some bricks were resurrected in the construction of Subway Line 2, which has operated ever since. The wall had been regarded as the “flesh and skin” of the city’s old citizens. The lost cultural memory sealed in every brick continues to haunt the city, from the fundamental units of construction to media representations and metaphors in virtual-world engineering. When the body of a brick is destroyed, it splits into two: a ghost, and a bogus object reduced to a mere texture overlaid on a block of concrete. What remains of a “brick” is the smallest unit of a home—one that exists only in imagination.

“I’ll hammer away at our home —
our past will resurrect, sealed in every brick.”