Beginning in 1996, Feng Mengbo parlayed his interest in video games into a form of interactive art. Initially conceived as a collection of slides intended to document family history, My Private Album consists of a study of the artist's life in the context of a multigenerational family including grandparents, parents, and his wife. This work juxtaposes history as seen from a personal, familial perspective with official history. The images are drawn from a wide variety of sources including the family photo album, old gramophone records, book pages, sections of movies, drawings, paintings, postcards, his own digital movies, and other memorabilia depicting Chinese culture of the late twentieth century. The images are generated with a Macintosh computer and are projected with a digital projector onto a screen surrounded by curtains to give it the appearance of a miniature theater.
Viewers can manipulate the order of events appearing on the screen by using a mouse and keypad.
It is based on a mixing of the video game Doom with the opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy from the Cultural Revolution era and includes 42 clips from the film of the same title. In the hands of Feng Mengbo, the romanticized propaganda themes of the opera and the film are laced with gentle irony and wit. These sources are mixed and adapted by the artist according to his own fantasies and imagination. Feng Mengbo believes that the video game is a source of art. This claim does not arise from any lack of training or knowledge of the fine arts.