Presented by San Francisco Cinematheque in association with the Chinese Historical Society of America
Friday, June 2, 2023
7:30pm doors / 8pm show
Tickets $15 (discounted or free for members)
"Disconnected from the flow of daily life, Simon Liu’s incursion into the alienation of Hong Kong is an enigmatic symphony of the city’s discordance and fury. Something belies the trance cast by this tapestry of 16mm images—is it unrest or is it complacency? Or is it already too late?" (MUBI)
With dramatic kineticism, a thrilling use of color, a freewheeling and improvisatory approach to editing, and deeply layered soundtracks, the dynamic films of New York–based, Hong Kong–born filmmaker Simon Liu paradoxically embody attitudes of travel, drift, and observation. All filmed in his hometown of Hong Kong, the films on this program explore that city at a moment of historical and political uncertainty, a moment at which the future is unclear yet at which life goes on. Generally avoiding overt politics and summarizing statements, Liu instead focuses on the luminosity of the city’s surfaces, the energy of public space, the wary motions of inhabitants, and the uneasy flow of life. Distantly intimate, visually and sonically roving, and vaguely unsettling and fragmentary, Liu’s works of ravenous and overwhelming audiovisual synesthesia are obliquely personal and diaristic approaches to the city symphony genre. Screening will include E-Ticket (2019), Signal 8 (2019), Happy Valley (2020), and Devil's Peak (2021), all by Simon Liu. Bonus! Screening will also include the anomalously animated
—force— (2020), in which Liu’s lush visual lyricism collides with sister Jennie MaryTai Liu’s digital animation in a vaporwave parody of dystopian surveillance state semiotics. Complete screening details here.
Simon Liu (b. Hong Kong, 1987) is an artist filmmaker whose films, video installations, and expanded cinema performances function as dense and lyrical repositories of the rapidly evolving psychogeography of his homeland of Hong Kong. His work has been exhibited at film festivals and museums globally, including the Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival), Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, CROSSROADS with San Francisco Cinematheque, The Shed, M+ Museum, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, MOCA Los Angeles, Moderna Museet, Dreamlands: Expanded, and a solo screening at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) as part of their Modern Mondays series. He has received grants and commissions from the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, M+, and The Shed, and his films and performance works are in the permanent collections of the M+ Museum and MoMA. Profiles of his practice have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Art in America, Cinemascope, MUBI, Nang Magazine, and Millennium Film Journal. Liu is a teacher at the Cooper Union School of Art and a member of the artist-run film lab Negativeland, and is currently editing his first feature film, Staffordshire Hoard.
Pictured: Devil’s Peak (2021), by Simon Liu