"I do feel like I'm creating a phantasmagoria experience because it's grounded in the physical world—the audience can see that there's a screen and there's projectors, and there's me transforming into a shadow. But once I become a shadow, it becomes a very fantastical, surreal experience, very dreamlike. I'm interested in the intersection of the ephemeral, this kind of dream logic, but grounded in the visceral."

Matreyek developed her signature style after receiving her MFA in Experimental Animation and Integrated Media from CalArts in 2007, and she's performed her interdisciplinary shadow performances all around the world at venues and events such as TED and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her first two works Myth and Infrastructure (2010) and This World Made Itself (2013) were quite whimsical in nature, and explored the relationship between humanity and our world, both physical and mental, natural and man made.

But her tone darkened over the years as she became more focused on the unfolding climate catastrophe. "I do have a whimsical side to me, but as I've made work, I've realised how powerful this mode of storytelling is and how audiences have been quite affected by it. So I understood that as an artist, I had crafted a visceral tool and began to question what I wanted to lend my magical powers to."

Matreyek will be bringing all three of her signature works to the 52nd Hong Kong Arts Festival. When put together, the artist says the performances trigger "a kind of exorcism" of our collective climate anxiety. "But then again the pieces are just really magical and that's all they need to be."