
Join filmmaker Simon Liu for a deep dive into his wide-ranging body of analog-based experimental films. Made between 2014 and 2022, Liu’s sensorially overwhelming repositories of memory and feeling function as transnational time machines. Over this relatively short period, Liu—who was born and raised in Hong Kong and is now based in New York City—has created a psychogeographic archive of his homeland as it undergoes rapid historical changes, a body of short films that powerfully reflect on his place of origin and family, including breathtaking 16mm multiple-projection performances (two of which, Highview and Harbour City Redux, are featured in this program). His work channels the post-digital, post-colonial, and postmodern qualities of a contemporary diasporic experience. A slew of labor-intensive image-making processes, utilizing both the camera and film lab, reveal a search for unpredictable images, reflecting dislocation and pushing visual experimentation to extremes. This is exemplified by the evocatively titled E-Ticket, a collage comprising 13,000 individual 35mm splices that frantically merges the kaleidoscopic and the encyclopedic in the obliteration of a personal archive. Liu’s unique combination of editorial precision and trust in light and photochemical processes allows for moments of tender clarity amid frenetic abstraction.
Signal 8, Happy Valley, and -force-, a trio of works that subvert documentary form, made amid the ongoing sociopolitical upheaval in Hong Kong, consciously avoid explicit imagery of the unrest, but eeriness, pain, and violence haunt the edges of their hypnotic frames. When working in Hong Kong, a city already richly captured in its own cinematic history, Liu focuses an expansive gaze on overlooked details, elevating the mundane to conjure ghostly whispers from the concrete. The digital animation in -force-, made in collaboration with sibling Jennie MaryTai Liu, is especially notable for this post-Internet, analog filmmaker, suggesting a point of no return. These deeply enigmatic works can be viewed as clues to what it means to call a place home. Liu’s films wonder, can we ever go back? Perhaps only through images.
Harbour City Redux. 2015/22, Hong Kong/USA. Directed by Simon Liu. Quadruple 16mm projection performance. 12 min.
Signal 8. 2019. Hong Kong/USA. Directed by Simon Liu. 14 min.
E-Ticket. 2019. Hong Kong/USA. Directed by Simon Liu. 13 min.
-force-. 2020. Hong Kong/USA. Directed by Simon Liu & Jennie MaryTai Liu. 9 min.
Happy Valley. 2020. Hong Kong/USA. Directed by Simon Liu. 13 min.
Highview. 2017. Hong Kong/USA. Directed by Simon Liu. Quadruple 16mm projection performance. Silent. 22 min.
Program approx. 87 min.
All films produced by Rachael Lawe.
Sound from Signal 8 and E-Ticket by Devin Johnson.
Sound from -force- by Andrew Gilbert.
Sound from Harbour City Redux and Happy Valley by LiuSeeLiu.
Please note this program contains strobing effects.