Simon Liu

A view through cracks between fish markets and high-rise buildings; urban imagery of Hong Kong and the indulgence of domestic life. Hong Kong's hyperactive fish market in overwhelming colors.

This past summer I spent a month in Hong Kong with my family in the house I grew up in.

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)

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.

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

A chaotic tapestry of emblems and luminous portals guide us through the warped signage and smearing surfaces of Hong Kong in Simon Liu’s film, a densely layered reverie of civic spaces that appear to be dissolving into irreality. Exploding across uncanny mindscapes, Procedures explores the iridescent somewhere of a city as a labyrinth of gated geometries and stifled energies.

A film sixteen thousand splices in the making. E-Ticket is a frantic (re)cataloguing of a personal archive and an opportunity for rebirth to forgotten images. 35mm photographs and moving pictures are obsessively cut apart, reshuffled then tape spliced together inch by inch in rigid increments. My photographs may have all been cut up and mixed around, but at least they’re all in one place now. A retelling of Dante's Inferno for the streaming age; a freedom of movement reserved for the modern cloud.

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.

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.

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.

Tangled spirals, rapid encounters, a quiet war between the vertical and the horizontal: Simon Liu’s Refuse Room captures Hong Kong’s architectural densities and lurid fluorescence through shadows, graffiti, and detritus, surfacing the tense and dizzying atmospheres of a city in anxious slumber, caught between fragmentation and solidarity.

In the wake of cataclysmic regional change in the artist's homeland of Hong Kong, Simon Liu’s Cinema-Strobo-Scopic film features a laborious sequence of analogue darkroom practices and dense shrouds of video processing techniques which actively work to both conceal and reappraise approaches to personal expression in the face of censorship. Times ahead and behind collide - a new linearity is in need of; the glittering lore of the way things were, generations lost to resolution errors. Sifting through new realities of misinformation, digital consciousness, and cultural disappearance, "Single File" seeks new lexicons of disobedience through formal experimentation.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Produced during the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from Great Britain to Mainland China in the wake of cataclysmic regional changes, Simon Liu’s dizzying, claustrophobic Let’s Talk captures the anxiety of an uncertain future.

'Splits in Two' takes influence from Cantonese Ghost Stories as it parses both the physical and figurative landscape of contemporary Hong Kong, a city whose underground art scene persists as a larger cultural identity risks dissipation.