Are You Living Or Leaving (2022) is an imaginative depiction of a living space in the afterlife— a playful speculation about alternative possibilities in the clouds.

In this artwork, motoguo and Ejin Sha take cue from their Malaysian Chinese tradition of burning paper effigies, known as zhizha in Mandarin, which is a type of traditional paper craft which imitates the appearance of objects used by the living. Clothes, money and food made out of paper are subsequently purchased and burnt for the dead by loved ones for the deceased to ensure a comfortable afterlife.

The artists draw parallels between zhizha and the digital concept of cloud storage. The cloud, symbolic of a centralised computing centre floating above that stores data, is similar to the practice of burning zhizha offerings. Just as smoke rises from the burning, everyday comforts from the living to the deceased are “uploaded” to the cloud.