Simon Liu
2021
Signal 8
Simon Liu
Simon Liu's eerie, entrancing portrait of contemporary Hong Kong tracks a series of strange disruptions to the city's urban infrastructure. Deceptively tranquil 16mm images of everyday life are accompanied by muffled music cues, ominous radio transmissions, and intimations of an impending hazardous event that may never arrive.
Signal 8
E-Ticket
Simon Liu
E-Ticket is a cinematic collage in the form of a flicker film. The frame rapidly swipes through my archive of 35mm still photographs; which have been obsessively tape spliced together, one frame at a time in evolving rhythmic patterns. Views shift between a high school trip in India to snap shots from my first year living alone; culminating in the documentation of a violent 2005 protest of a World Trade Organization summit in Hong Kong.
E-Ticket
Sneyd Green
Simon Liu
It’s any day, any year in the house of Alan and Vera Ellis in their Post-Industrial English conurbation formerly known for their world renown pottery industry, yet this week they are interrupted by their 16mm camera toting grandson. This year's spring is one of moving, dancing, and gliding more softly and with greater awareness. Conceived as a ditty and presented with an orchestra of loved ones, Sneyd Green is a handmade exploration of positive and negative space in concert with past and present yearnings.
Sneyd Green
- force -
Simon Liu, Jennie MaryTai Liu
A promise for outstanding regulatory conduct is called into question. A fire has been started, movement has gone on to reach multiple points of no return. A response to the new order of an all-encompassing yet undefined set of rules; a symbolic depiction of the year that changed a city forever. Water now must flow underground - hand in hand we stand.
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Highview
Simon Liu
Personal moments are lost in film cuttings or disappear into a coloured fog only to suddenly reappear in a new constellation. This is the visual richness of Highview: four, partially overlapping, 16mm images that fully coalesce into a colourful abstract painting, but also often create a narrative as an exploded montage.
Highview
Afternoon In
Simon Liu
An afternoon in to myself. Digging in inside. Ink spills: spilt nothing or at least no thing that I was fast enough to film. Light shines on mangled legs, basking like a cat, working on a cut. Sixteen bi-packed, rewind knob, winding back for density; covering the singular moments of time that have already unwound out of the room. Thought in images: ideas and images for a film that will never be made but I make in my head as I check to see if the stove gas is secretly on over and over. And over again. I will not go outside today. It is simply time for an afternoon in to myself.
Afternoon In
Star Ferry
Simon Liu
Impressions of Hong Kong and Tokyo by day and night shot entirely with a 35mm still camera. Star Ferry is structured between moments of stasis and frenetic movement, drawing out tensions between abrupt passages forward past neon signs and LED advertisements to quiet observations of personal rituals.
Star Ferry
Shuffle Cove
Simon Liu
Harmony (n.) a consistent, orderly, or pleasing arrangement of parts; congruity. Forgive my nerves— rattling of my subjective coloring and inverted subjects! With a focus on my affinity for the ephemeral, this is in part a remix of left over footage shot and then re-printed on a now defunct and sorely missed Kodak film stock, 7285. A record of my trudging foray into Step-Printing and the indulgence of rediscovering old scraps of images. Conversely, I applied the techniques of Richard Tuohy’s Chromaflex process to weld together then shred apart film scraps guided by an electric pleasure for a visual clash and at moments, harmony. (Simon Liu)
Shuffle Cove
