The gallery has been turned into an arcade, but the games cannot be won. At de Sarthe in Hong Kong, Toronto artist Mitchell F. Chan's Workers' Playtime — his first solo exhibition in Asia, on view through 21 November 2026 — is built around six wall-mounted sculptures that look like pinball machines and behave like traps.

Each work sets a printed scene — an open-plan office, a factory floor, a home, a stock-trading room — inside a box painted in a single saturated colour, then fits it with working flippers, bumpers and ramps. Visitors are invited to play, and the machines invite them to keep trying. In Cliff Hangers, set against an office backdrop, the ball always stops just short of its target, however the player adjusts. In Daddy's Home, two balls roll toward each other along a V-shaped track that never meets. In Roundtrippin', set in the world of finance, the ball ricochets around on its own, racking up points while the player watches, reduced to a spectator.

The centrepiece extends the joke into the digital realm: Worker's Playtime: Luxury Edition is a video game, bright and noisy in the manner of a vintage machine, with a plush couch set before it. Put the controller down and the game simply carries on without you. The point is made quietly and repeatedly across the room: the games are rigged, and no amount of skill changes the outcome.

Chan is best known for a very different kind of game. His 2017 blockchain work Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, one of the earliest NFT artworks, appeared at the Fondazione Prada during the 2024 Venice Biennale and later sold for $1.5 million at Sotheby's. He also writes on art and technology for Artforum. Here he has traded the blockchain for the pinball table to make a single argument: turning labour into a game does not set workers free — it makes the work harder to refuse.