Nervegear

Nervegear is a staged photographic series exploring the emotional passage between lived reality and the “two-dimensional” worlds of anime, manga, and games. In Chinese popular culture, erciyuan (二次元, literally “two-dimensional”) describes not only a group of media, but also a space of identification and emotional attachment. These fictional worlds may depart from ordinary reality, yet they are constructed from its materials: relationships, social conflict, desire, morality, kindness, and violence. For me, the emotions they produce are not imaginary. They have shaped how I understand relationships, values, and the world around me.

Through tableau photography, I bring these experiences back into physical space. Virtual narratives are reconstructed with real bodies, objects, and environments, before being returned to image form through the camera. This circular movement—from reality into fiction, and from fiction back into staged reality—is central to the work. Rather than treating the two-dimensional world as a sealed fantasy, the series considers how fictional images enter memory, influence our perception, and become part of lived experience.

The title is borrowed from Sword Art Online, in which the NerveGear is a virtual-reality device that connects the body to a virtual world. In this project, it becomes a metaphor for photography itself: an interface through which emotional and visual material can move between fictional and physical realities. Nervegear proposes that anime, manga, and games are not simply childish forms of escape, but spaces in which imagination, emotion, morality, and society are reflected, intensified, and reconfigured.