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AT 6PM PRECISELY, Beijing artist Feng Mengbo starts to send text through the MSN messaging system. We have agreed to meet in cyberspace. It seems a likely spot for an interview, seeing that the 38-year-old is reputed to spend most of his waking hours deliberating over his electronic artworks, wired to the Web.

Our chat will also be an apt test. A strong theme of Feng's art is to explore human communication through a computer. His aim has been to personalise video gaming by creating challenging, intelligent and visually spectacular alternatives of his own.

Will we communicate effectively in this faceless realm?

We begin by bypassing small talk. There doesn't seem much point without handshakes and facial expressions. Or maybe it's Feng's short, no-nonsense, snappy sentences that are shaping the rapid-fire questions and answers. Did he visit Taipei for the opening of Past Visualized - Future Cloned: Feng Mengbo 1994-2003, a massive retrospective currently occupying the ground floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art? 'It's a pity I didn't go because of Sars,' he types back.

'What are you working on now?' I tap.

'Finishing the last bit of my work for Q4U. I will go to England to show it to LAB3D,' Feng replies.

Already, we're moving away from standard conversation, but there are easy explanations here. Q4U precedes one of Feng's most recent works, Ah_Q, which was acclaimed last year by critics at Documenta 11, one of the world's largest exhibitions of contemporary art in Kassel, Germany. Ah_Q featured three gigantic, ceiling-height screens and three digital pads set out on the floor. The central zone was reserved for the artist, and on either side members of the audience were invited to step up and enter the game. By moving their bodies, they would navigate their way through an alarming world - eerily similar to game console Quake III Area, except that in this fiery, urban landscape there is an endless stream of deadly 'Feng Mengbos' to battle.

The law is shoot him, or be shot yourself. Except of course, you're metaphorically 'killing' the competitors to the side of you. Feng has made a strange self-portrait, and a violent vision with the explosion of twitching, bloodied bodies on screen.

An eight-minute film of Ah_Q is being screened this week, along with digital photographs of scenes from the game, at Hanart TZ Gallery in Central, in a show that is timed to coincide with the Taipei retrospective.

Hanart's gallery owner and curator, Chang Tsong-zung, catapulted Feng into the admiring Western art world when he invited Feng to contribute to the influential China's New Art, Post-1989 show in 1993.

Ah_Q 'feels more violent [than computer games]', Chang says. 'You're facing someone with a real human image, and psychologically it is more violent because you're killing someone next to you, in real time.'

Feng types that he would now like to edge into theatre. So I comment on the possibility of seeing exploding limbs on stage.

'My works are not bloody,' he writes. 'The blood you see is only a colour pixel on the screen. Compared to human history, even one drop of blood is much more bloody than my whole movie. I use violent scenes just as others would use flowers for their paintings.'

Feng's work began with paint. His 1994 Game Over series featured acrylic-painted canvases, with scenes influenced by the popular Super Mario Land game. Feng's characters and plots were derived from Cultural Revolution operas, however, with political figures such as Mao Zedong hurling exploding Coke cans as grenades.

Always mixing a personal slant of the world with historical references and fighting (an interest, he says, 'since I was a young boy') Feng's 'dream' was to create a game of his own. A self-professed computer-game addict, there was an emptiness, he says, to his relentless sessions of game-playing. There was something missing.

'I tried to see something behind the screen,' his Web site, www.mengbo.com, says. 'There should be something there, there should be some reason why video games make the players crazy.'

When Quake released a demo that allowed players to manipulate their own storylines, he set about answering his own question. The result was Taking Mt Doom By Strategy (1997), an interactive game based on the Cultural Revolution model operas that had influenced him as a child. It was a way of humanising the game experience, he says.

'We couldn't be heroes in computer games such as Quake, but we could be in these operas.'

Past Visualized - Future Cloned: Feng Mengbo 1994-2003. Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei. Ends July 27. www.mocataipei.org AH-Q, Video + Photography of Feng Mengbo, Hanart TZ Gallery, 2/F Henley Building, 5 Queen's Rd, Central. Tel: 2526 9019. Opens tomorrow-June 7



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