Too Rich City: A Sinofuturist Playground

The rapid proliferation of digital technologies has reshaped artistic practices and our understanding of urban spaces. Within this evolving digital landscape, the concept of Sinofuturism has emerged as a critical lens through which to examine the unique intersections of technological advancement, cultural identity, and future imaginaries in China. Coined by Lawrence Lek in 2016, Sinofuturism depicts the Sinospheric societal response to its digital development: a “science fiction that already exists.”¹Lawrence Lek’s “Sinofuturism” is a video essay that discusses technological development and cultural clichés in contemporary Chinese society. See Lawrence Lek, “Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD),” 2016, accessed April 28, 2025, https://www.lawrencelek.com/works/sinofuturism. Scholars have since debated whether the term is a productive critical framework or an orientalist label projected onto China from the outside.²See Gabriele de Seta, “Three Lies of Digital Ethnography,” Journal of Digital Social Research 2, no. 1 (February 17, 2020): 77–97. https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v2i1.24. More recently, Xinyang Zhao and Michael Keane (2023) suggest that Sinofuturism should be understood within a “techno-cultural imaginary,”³Xinyang Zhao and Michael Keane, “Sino-Futurism and Alternative Imaginaries of Digital China,” Media International Australia 196, no. 1 (November 15, 2023): 215–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878×231215108. one that encompasses both state-led techno-utopian narratives and speculative artistic practices that explore alternative digital futures.

This article argues that Huang Heshan’s ongoing virtual city-building, multimedia project Too Rich City (2021–) exemplifies such an imaginary by fusing Sinofuturism, virtual urbanism, and playability. Rather than treating Sinofuturism as an aesthetic category applied retrospectively, I suggest that Too Rich City actively generates Sinofuturist experience through its hybrid forms of interaction. Its 360-degree projections, augmented reality integrations, and blockchain-based real estate all present “play” not only as entertainment but as a means of navigating and negotiating urban precarity in digital form. In doing so, Too Rich City reframes Chinese urban space as a dynamic, participatory entity, co-produced by users and shaped by their economic, cultural, and affective investments. Crucially, Too Rich City is not simply a critique of China’s consumerist turn, nor an endorsement of speculative digital capitalism. Instead, it inhabits an ambivalent middle ground: an ironic but earnest exploration of how youth navigate the impossibility of physical property ownership by reimagining belonging through digital space. Here, “playability” provides the connective tissue between Sinofuturist aesthetics and lived socioeconomic conditions, transforming Huang’s project into what Zhao and Keane would call an alternative imaginary of digital China.

Sinofuturist Urban and Digital Landscape

Sinofuturism has generated significant discussion in recent years as a means of understanding the specific ways in which China engages with technology, modernity, and the future. While the term itself is contested, the rapid transformations of Chinese cities, marked by demolition, accelerated construction, and digital integration. This sense, Sinofuturism is not only a speculative aesthetic but also a way of grasping how urban environments are lived, documented, and reimagined through digital media.⁴Roman Kierst, “Wealth and Peril in Beijing Artist Huang Heshan’s City Dreamscapes,” The World of Chinese, 2024. https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2024/05/too-rich-wealth-and-peril-in-huang-heshans-city-dreamscapes/. Rather than being locked into either techno-utopian celebration or dystopian critique, it foregrounds the contradictions between hyper-modern spectacle, lingering tradition, and everyday negotiation of urban density. Digital practices capture and remix fragments of the built environment, turning signage, landmarks, and housing blocks into composite imaginaries that echo the excess and hybridity of contemporary Chinese cities. These artistic reconfigurations highlight how rapidly evolving urban landscapes operate on two temporal registers at once: they promise futuristic speed and scale while erasing older forms of urban life. In Zhao and Keane’s terms, this is the space where alternative digital Chinas can be imagined — not by projecting a single future, but by multiplying ways of engaging with the present.

It is within this terrain that Too Rich City situates itself. Synthesizing photographs of dense and chaotic urban forms into a virtual cityscape⁵The highly saturated and over-crowded signages demonstrate the evolving urbanism in Chinese cities. See Yineng Cai, “The Icon of Chinese Urbanism Everyone Loves to Hate,” SixthTone, April 25, 2025. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1017014., Huang coins the aesthetic of “Plastic Punk”⁶ejoveart, “Artist-Huangheshan – Ejoveart,” November 12, 2024. https://ejoveart.com/artist-huangheshan/.: a blend of punk’s DIY ethos⁷Pete Dale, Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground (Ashgate Publishing, 2012). with China’s global reputation as the world’s factory. The style resonates with Sinofuturist tropes of excess, hybridity, and saturation, but Too Rich City extends the framework by making urban participation itself a form of play. Through installations, augmented reality overlays, and blockchain-based property sales, Huang does not simply depict urban contradictions — he gamifies them, asking audiences to inhabit the speculative logics of real estate, branding, and placemaking within digital space. Here, “playability” emerges as the connective tissue between Sinofuturism and virtual urbanism. Play is not confined to game mechanics but spans exploration, speculation, storytelling, and collective imagination. By inviting users to buy, trade, and narrate virtual properties, Too Rich City reframes urban space as dynamic and participatory, shaped not only by official planning or market pressures but by the playful interventions of its digital citizens. In this way, Huang’s project is neither a simple critique nor a celebration, but an experimental mode of inhabiting futures that are already embedded in the present.

Virtual Presence and Real Word Resonances

The inherent “playability” of Too Rich City is one of its most compelling aspects, extending far beyond traditional notions of gameplay. A distinctive feature of Too Rich City is its deliberate connection between the virtual realm and tangible real-world manifestations. Play here stretches beyond conventional game mechanics to include exploration, speculation, storytelling, and affective engagement. Engaging with semi-fictional yet real hometowns becomes a form of placemaking, “redefining” the players’ relationship with these Chinese cities as well as “revitalizing public space”⁸Kuangfan Chen, Mirko Guaralda, Jeremy Kerr and Selen Turkay, “Playful Digital Interventions in Placemaking: Constructing a Typology for Playable Digital Interventions in Public Spaces (PDIPS),” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 207 (October 2024): 123623. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2024.123623. through the act of playing.

Exploratory Play

Audiences encounter Too Rich City through immersive formats that invite them to move through its landscapes. In the Beijing 798 Art Zone (2022) and at the Shanghai OPENFILE Festival of Contemporary Visual Culture (September 2024), a 360-degree video projection surrounded viewers with shifting images of the virtual city, encouraging them to identify familiar architectural details and imagine possible stories within them. Augmented reality has further extended this exploratory mode: in August 2023, Huang partnered with a mobile payment app in Chongqing, overlaying landmarks with Too Rich City elements in the real city space that users could collect by activating AR landmarks with their phones in exchange for retail rewards.⁹“Alipay x Digital Artist Huang Heshan: Using AR to Reveal the Magical Chongqing (支付宝×数字艺术家黄河山：用AR唤醒魔幻重庆),” DIGITALING, accessed April 28, 2025. https://www.digitaling.com/projects/257739.html. These experiences transform spectators into active participants, merging digital play with the navigation of real urban space.

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Speculative Play

Too Rich City project further strengthened the connection between the virtual and the real as well as emphasising the role of its players through making the 2D virtual images and videos to 3D models, which are both digital and physical. The physical exhibitions showcasing models of the virtual city provide a crucial link between the digital and the material. Since 2021, numerous pop-up exhibitions have taken place in major Chinese cities. An iconic Too Rich City landmark (an animated LED statue that can be seen throughout Huang’s design) had a physical presence as an installation as part of the Singularity Festival in Beijing (May 2024). However, the event that paved the way for players owning parts of the Too Rich City was the pop-up stall in Taobao Maker Festival in Shanghai (July 2021). The Maker Festivals are organised annually by one of the largest online shopping platforms in China, which provides not only virtual storefront but also physical stalls in time-limited festivals. Partaking in this event, the pop-up stall for the Too Rich City project is a recreation of the rooftop of “Too Rich Real Estate Agent”, overlooking the “skyline” (in the form of a backdrop) of the city. For the Maker Festival 2021, this virtual real estate agent is to promote and sell the virtual properties of one of the neighbourhoods in Too Rich City, which is a combination of condos and detached houses. These digital properties are bought and sold on the blockchain. Interestingly, these virtual properties are offered at a fraction of the cost of physical properties in places like Shanghai, roughly 1/500th of the rate (The condos are priced around RMB 100 each, while the houses range from RMB 2,000 to RMB 4,000). When someone buys one of these virtual properties, they receive a paper copy of the deed. This deed contains a QR code which, when scanned, provides the owner with a private key to save to their digital wallet, confirming ownership on the blockchain.¹⁰Alibaba Group, “Latest Property Trend from China: Buy a Virtual Condo on NFT,” August 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ige8Alt90L4. He collaborated with the blockchain platform NEAR to create this virtual housing complex. The complex contained around 300 units and was selling well at the Festival. Each property boasts a unique design and functions not only as a virtual space but also as a piece of NFT art, which has the potential to appreciate in value. The provision of physical deeds for virtual property ownership creates a tangible anchor for digital assets. Modelled after real-world property deeds, these physical artifacts imbue the virtual ownership with a sense of material reality and permanence. The speculative logic of scarcity was carefully preserved: once a neighbourhood sold out, it would not be expanded, echoing the artificial scarcity of physical housing markets. Speculative play thus parodies the financialization of urban life while also offering participants a symbolic stake in the city. However, Huang planned to put other units from different parts of the city on the market in the future.

Narrative Play

Beyond ownership, the city grows through the contributions of its inhabitants. On Discord servers and within Voxels, users spin stories about characters, neighbourhood histories, and rumours, thickening the city’s atmosphere. Huang often refers to Too Rich City as a “cyber hometown,” a semi-fictional yet emotionally resonant place where participants can anchor belonging. Exhibitions such as The Old White Swan Passenger at Fotografiska Shanghai (May 2025) expanded this narrative mode: audiences boarded a simulated flying vehicle that travelled across a shifting digital Shanghai, folding memories of Zhongshan Park into futuristic vistas.¹¹“Fotografiska unveils digital art show ‘Old White Swan’,” City News Service, accessed August 20, 2025. https://www.citynewsservice.cn/events/Fotografiska-unveils-digital-art-show-%27Old-White-Swan%27-znx6zjn5. These layered stories recast Too Rich City as a collaborative act of placemaking, where players reshape both digital and physical understandings of urban space.

Affective Play

The tension between irony and sincerity runs throughout the project. Huang’s claim that NFTs might “alleviate” real housing pressures reads as both a joke and a provocation, yet it captures the lived frustrations of a generation priced out of ownership. Virtual property does not equate to physical property, but Huang’s project creates a substituted sense of belonging in the virtual space. At the same time, brand partnerships introduce another affective register. Virtual billboards in Too Rich City host advertisements for real companies, turning digital buildings into marketing surfaces and drawing consumer culture into the artwork itself. For corporate actors, this becomes its own form of play — an experiment in reaching audiences within speculative worlds. For viewers, the collision of satire, aspiration, and commerce produces a complex affective texture, oscillating between delight, cynicism, and uneasy recognition.

Taken together, these modes of playability show how Too Rich City operates at the intersection of Sinofuturism and urban imaginaries. Exploratory wandering, speculative ownership, collective storytelling, and affective investment turn the project into a participatory arena where digital and material realities overlap. What emerges is not only a virtual city but a Sinofuturist playground that mirrors and reframes the contradictions of Chinese urban life through play.

Becoming Players: Manifestations and Limitations

In a collaborative effort between Huang Heshan, Web3Games, and the NEAR Protocol, Too Rich City materialized as a collection of hundreds of distinct virtual architectural assets within the digital realm of the “Bu Tu Garden Community” – the neighbourhood that was represented in physical form in the Taobao Maker Festival. This strategic move, leveraging the accessibility and widespread user base of Taobao, marked a unique approach to introducing blockchain technology and digital ownership. Huang facilitated an unconventional yet highly accessible acquisition process for these virtual assets. Upon completion of the transaction with Chinese Yuan, purchasers would receive a link containing their unique NFT digital artwork. The subsequent process of claiming the NFT was intentionally streamlined for users who are new to the concept of blockchain. By simply opening the provided link, individuals were guided through a few straightforward steps to register a virtual wallet and seamlessly claim their purchased digital assets. This user-friendly onboarding flow, coupled with the exceptionally low transaction fees, effectively lowered the barrier to entry, making interaction with cryptocurrency and NFT ownership inexpensive and uncomplicated for individuals with limited or no prior experience in the crypto space.

Ownership, however, was only one dimension. Huang also constructed Too Rich City as an inhabitable environment in the virtual platform Voxels (formerly Cryptovoxels). Here the city was rendered as a walkable district with trademark Chinese signage, where users could traverse streets, enter galleries, and attend events. This move shifted emphasis from asset-holding to presence and agency. Participants could inhabit avatars, navigate architectural forms, and explore the city as digital citizens. These episodes framed the project not as a collection of digital assets but as a stage for social rituals, blending satire, spectacle, and intimacy.

Furthermore, community building and the collaborative creation of narratives are central to the “playability” of Too Rich City, largely facilitated through the project’s dedicated Discord forum. This platform serves as a space for communication, information exchange, and the cultivation of a shared sense of belonging among participants. Players are ranked based on the virtual properties they own, which could be a villa, a condo, a parking space or as small as a digital cigarette. The higher the rank, the rarer the virtual assets are, which also helps to create a narrative of the players’ character in the city. Crucially, the artists actively encourage citizens to contribute storylines for their virtual avatars and properties, explicitly framing these contributions as inspiration for the further expansion and development of the metaverse. In September 2021, Huang also hosted a metaverse wedding for a Too Rich Citizen couple on Voxels, joined by other players as the wedding guests and was live streamed for its Discord members. This invitation to co-create the narrative fabric of Too Rich City underscores a move beyond traditional notions of gameplay, encompassing social interaction, creative contribution, and the collective construction of a shared virtual world. The interplay between these diverse platforms – the blockchain-based ownership on NEAR, the spatial exploration within Voxels, and the narrative co-creation on Discord – contributes to the multifaceted “playability” of the project, where financial speculation intertwines with creative expression and community engagement.

These manifold modes of participation brought different kinds of players into being: investors, citizens, storytellers, and spectators. Yet they also exposed tensions between imaginative play and the realities of digital economies. During the Maker Festival, Huang suggested that NFT property might “alleviate” the struggles of young people excluded from China’s real housing markets.¹²Huang shared his rationale behind launching virtual property in this video. Alibaba Group, 2021. The claim was deliberately provocative, at once satirical and poignant. Virtual deeds could not resolve material housing insecurity, but they dramatised the anxieties of a generation confronting urban precarity. What the project offered was not a solution but a symbolic act of ownership as well as an imaginative coping mechanism staged within the unstable terrain of blockchain speculation.

However, the trajectory of Too Rich City is not without its limitations. Reflecting on the broader context of the NFT market and the evolution of the metaverse reveals potential challenges. Following the significant peak of NFT hype around 2022, the market has experienced a notable cooling period. The community activities on Discord and Voxel have also been slowed down significantly since 2023. While the artistic vision and the engaged community provide a degree of resilience, the overall enthusiasm and speculative investment surrounding virtual assets can influence the project’s growth and sustainability. The slower-than-expected maturation of the metaverse as a whole might also limit the potential for widespread adoption and active participation within virtual worlds like the Voxels iteration of Too Rich City.¹³Another Chinese metaverse controversy and technological limitations are further explored here: Yaling Jiang, “Chinese Buyers Join Metaverse Land Rush,” SixthTone, January 5, 2022, accessed April 28, 2025. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1009364. Acknowledging these limitations is crucial for a nuanced understanding of the project’s current standing and its future prospects within the evolving digital landscape. Despite these limits, Too Rich City remains a notable experiment in transforming audiences into players. Its playful translation of property markets, its inhabitable voxel landscapes, its narrative-rich Discord community, and its symbolic gestures of ownership together illustrate how Sinofuturist imaginaries can be lived as much as they are represented. The project demonstrates how digital citizenship is constructed at the intersection of speculation, creativity, and sociality, while also revealing the volatility of those roles within unstable infrastructures. To become a “player” in Too Rich City is to participate in a paradox: the exhilaration of new urban imaginaries, tempered by the precariousness of the digital economies that sustain them.

The Future of Too Rich City

Huang’s notion of the ‘Plastic Punk’ aesthetic began as a description of working with readily available tools and platforms, yet it has become a guiding ethos for the project as a whole. Plastic Punk names not only a visual sensibility but also a survival strategy: an improvisational way of building worlds from whatever digital and material fragments are at hand. Within Too Rich City, this ethos frames the act of becoming a “citizen” through virtual property ownership as more than parody. To claim space in the digital metropolis is to rehearse forms of agency otherwise denied in physical housing markets, a symbolic counterpoint to the relentless pressures of urban survival. In this sense, citizenship itself becomes a kind of rebellion — playful, precarious, and pointedly ironic.

While blockchain markets have cooled and community activity has slowed, the project’s emphasis on playability (exploration, speculation, storytelling, affect) continues to anchor its significance. Hybrid formats, from AR overlays in Chongqing to immersive exhibitions in Shanghai, extend the city across the boundary of virtual and real, ensuring that the project evolves through shifting technological and cultural landscapes. Its reliance on user-generated content and collaborative authorship also points toward a resilience not tied to market cycles: even as enthusiasm for NFTs wanes, the imaginative labour of participants sustains Too Rich City as an ongoing experiment in collective world-making.

Seen through the lens of Sinofuturism, Too Rich City complicates the genre’s usual boundaries. It does not merely illustrate a futuristic Chinese aesthetic; it demonstrates how Sinofuturism can function as a practice of urban imagination. By transforming audiences into players (investors, citizens and storytellers) it situates Sinofuturism not only in the textures of digital art but in the lived negotiations of ownership, belonging, and precarity. The project’s fragility is part of its meaning: it stages the volatility of digital futures as both an artistic condition and a social reality. Too Rich City is therefore best understood as a Sinofuturist playground. Its future lies less in the stability of its platforms or assets than in its capacity to keep generating playful encounters with urban contradictions. Plastic Punk improvisation, blockchain speculation, Voxel inhabitation, and narrative co-creation together offer a vision of Sinofuturism that is not only aesthetic but experiential, a mode of navigating China’s digital present through acts of imaginative play. In this, Huang’s work reshapes how Sinofuturism itself is understood: not as a fixed genre or critique, but as an evolving practice of survival, creativity, and urban possibility.

Hsin Hsieh

Hsin Hsieh holds a PhD in Film and Theatre studies from the University of Reading. Her research interests include adaptation, film studies, metatheatricality, intermedia, and East Asian cinema and culture. Her recent publications include a chapter in East Asian Film Remakes (Edinburgh UP, 2023) as well as in Studio Ghibli Animation as Adaptations (Bloomsbury, 2025). She is currently working on the edited volume Oceans, Seas and Shorelines in Film (Routledge, 2025). She has been organising research workshops for Intermedia/Interarts Project (UK-China Humanities Alliance, funded by British Council) since 2021.