DE SARTHE is pleased to present Art Survivors, a solo exhibition by Hong Kong-based artist Mak2, following her major success at one of the most significant events on the art-world calendar. After a harrowing art week – an annual period during which real-world capitalist agendas are unleashed from behind the noble façade of art – the exhibition presents a chance for escape, where players of the art world may decompress via a detachment from tangible reality and a self-deprecating laugh. Featuring a first-person zombie shooting game set in an imaginary art fair as well as a new body of works on canvas titled Home From Home, the exhibition hints facetiously at the undercurrents of the art world system and congratulates those who have been able to survive thus far. Art Survivors opens on May 4th and runs through June 22nd, 2024. Upon entering the gallery, visitors are greeted by an enigmatic AI-generated video artwork projected across a line of clean room curtains. Aptly titled This Way to the Game (2024), the artwork serves as a welcome banner, foreshadowing the experience that awaits those who enter. Behind the curtains, a dark room houses the titular artwork Art Survivors (2024), an interactive FPS (first-person shooter) game newly created by Mak2 that invites its audience virtually into the world of a fictional art fair. Filled with the artist's own AI-generated artworks, what begins as a familiar cultural experience quickly escalates into a fight for survival – all the non-player characters have turned into zombies. Players must navigate through the fair and eliminate infected fair attendees, battling for victory in a place once of creative expression and appreciation, now turned into a labyrinth for survival.As the living dead charge at you wearing business casual outfits, the immersive storytelling of the game becomes as thought-provoking as it is thrilling. Synthesizing the imagined tranquility of an art fair with the chaotic absurdity of a zombie outbreak, the artwork posits a humorous hyperbole of certain invisible dynamics. Complete with rankings of both the best and worst players as well as droll reenactments of common art-fair-incited behaviors, the game magnifies and examines the aspects of competition, hierarchy, trauma, and strategy that are interwoven into the starry-eyed illusion of art. Art Survivors, however, is not just a tongue-in-cheek comment on art's Darwinist, dog-eat-dog world. It is, more importantly, a reminder of the ultimate objective: To stay alive without becoming one of the infected – and with the right adjustment to mindset, maybe even have fun.On the other side of the curtain, an unusual body of triptychs on canvas are displayed in the pristine, white-cube manner of a conventional, contemporary art gallery. A departure from Mak2's ongoing Home Sweet Home (2019) series, Home From Home (2024) utilizes AI-generated imagery that blends together contrasting scenarios from two different video games – scenes of domestic bliss from "The Sims" and the zombie apocalypse from Art Survivors. Just as the artist's previous series, the constructed images are cut into thirds and sent to be fabricated by different craftsmen found on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao.In stark contrast with their surrounding environment, the artworks encapsulate a tangled and volatile mess that reflects a similar truth conveyed by Mak2's zombie-shooting game. While Home Sweet Home had spoken to the notion of technology-enabled fantasies, Home From Home reveals the growing difficulty in separating comfort from conflict, questioning the validity of security and escapism via art and technology alike. From idealistic visions of art and life to the creative immaculacy of machine intelligence, each aspect of the artwork is progressively corrupted, either via zombie mutations or man-made inconsistences. With a final outcome of blurry humanoids against futuristic or floral backdrops, each further distorted by discrepancies between each panel, the layered narrative of Home From Home is as non-sensical as its visual content, and the unpredictable nature of each piece echoes life's own unpredictability. As reality inevitably spills into fantasy, Mak2 suggests that perhaps the better coping mechanism would be to blend the disagreeing aspects of existence into a whirlpool of beautiful yet unsettling harmony.In all seriousness, life is hard – in the art world or otherwise. Sometimes we fight, and sometimes we compromise. It is a never-ending game of survival through which only the fittest will prevail. However, as Art Survivors and Mak2's consistent use of comedy in her practice reminds us, we must learn to laugh through the bloodbath – because amidst all the violence and chaos, only a joke can keep us from the deadly effects of living.