Simon Liu
Historia
Simon Liu was raised between Hong Kong and Stoke-On-Trent, UK and now lives in Brooklyn, USA. Liu’s films and 16mm multiple projection performances have been presented at film festivals and institutions internationally including the International Film Festival Rotterdam: Tiger Short Competition, Toronto International Film Festival: Wavelengths, New York Film Festival: Projections, Sundance Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Edinburgh IFF, Hong Kong IFF, M+ Museum, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Parrish Art Museum. CROSSROADS @ SFMoMA, Festival du Nouvéau Cinéma, Hamburg Kurzfilmtage, Light Industry, Sheffield Doc/Fest, EMAF, EXiS, IMAGE FORUM and “Dreamlands: Expanded” with the Whitney Museum of American Art & Microscope Gallery. Liu is a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and a recipient of the NYSCA / Wave Farm Media Arts Assistance Fund in 2018. His work has been featured in publications including the South China Morning Post, MUBI, Nang Magazine, Millennium Film Journal, and DesistFilm. He is an Adjunct Instructor at the Cooper Union School of Art and a member Negativeland, an artist-run film lab in Brooklyn. He has given lectures and performed as a visiting artist at institutions such as the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Yale University and the Beijing Film Academy. Liu is currently in post-production on his first feature film, Staffordshire Hoard.
Director
Hide & Seek offers a layered reflection of Liu’s body of work, playfully repurposing images of urban spaces and personal histories. Composed with modular synthesizers, the soundscapes in this series open new generative possibilities in the artist's creative practice. The series aims to engage audiences with moving image in the contemporary era and highlight our experience of viewing artworks collectively in a screening space.
Director of Photography
Hide & Seek offers a layered reflection of Liu’s body of work, playfully repurposing images of urban spaces and personal histories. Composed with modular synthesizers, the soundscapes in this series open new generative possibilities in the artist's creative practice. The series aims to engage audiences with moving image in the contemporary era and highlight our experience of viewing artworks collectively in a screening space.
Director
In the hyperkinetic multichannel video installation Devil’s Peak, Simon Liu surveys the psychogeography of Hong Kong as a feverish dreamscape, activating charged sites of recent civic upheaval, personal heritage, and postcolonial legacies.
Editor
In Hong Kong, echoes of resistance and turmoil are sensitively captured on 16mm in this poetic rumination of public spaces and everyday life in a metropolis in upheaval.
Cinematography
In Hong Kong, echoes of resistance and turmoil are sensitively captured on 16mm in this poetic rumination of public spaces and everyday life in a metropolis in upheaval.
Director
In Hong Kong, echoes of resistance and turmoil are sensitively captured on 16mm in this poetic rumination of public spaces and everyday life in a metropolis in upheaval.
Director of Photography
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.
Screenplay
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.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Editor
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.
Director of Photography
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.
Director
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.
Production Design
Global in scope but intimate in spirit, Simon Liu's Fallen Arches is a dizzying assembly of footage shot between the bucolic English countryside and buzzing metropoles New York and Hong Kong.
Editor
Global in scope but intimate in spirit, Simon Liu's Fallen Arches is a dizzying assembly of footage shot between the bucolic English countryside and buzzing metropoles New York and Hong Kong.
Director of Photography
Global in scope but intimate in spirit, Simon Liu's Fallen Arches is a dizzying assembly of footage shot between the bucolic English countryside and buzzing metropoles New York and Hong Kong.
Director
Global in scope but intimate in spirit, Simon Liu's Fallen Arches is a dizzying assembly of footage shot between the bucolic English countryside and buzzing metropoles New York and Hong Kong.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
Hong Kong's hyperactive fish market in overwhelming colours.
Director
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)
Director
This past summer I spent a month in Hong Kong with my family in the house I grew up in.
Director
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.
Director
Ditchwork uses intimate physicality, folk-tale themes, and lush imagery to imaginatively fill in the blanks of a family history that is, like every history, both deeply known and unfathomably mysterious.
Director
"Flyer Boy" focuses in on a young man who spends his days handing out flyers for a local Chinatown restaurant. His work is full of fleeting exchanges, passing gestures and people he tries to communicate with.
Traditional values and modern ideals clash when an old-fashioned father and his playboy son cannot see eye to eye in this honest look at the sometimes fragile father, son relationship
