Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Film

Born 1987 in Hong Kong
Lives in Brooklyn, NY

Using a 16mm film format, Simon Liu creates a portrait of Hong Kong as a city in a state of flux. A former British colony, Hong Kong became a special administrative region of China in 1997. The footage for this work was filmed in 2022, twenty-five years after the handover—a period marked by a rapidly shifting climate of political and psychological precarity. In Let’s Talk, the artist intersperses disparate shots of airplanes, directional signage, and bridges with abstract imagery of light and color produced by the frenetic motion of the artist’s handheld camera. Here, even mundane symbols and actions can carry political stakes: images of arrow signs reference direction, street cleaning alludes to sanitation, while fencing implies control. Reimagining the everyday spaces of urban life, Liu looks to the city’s turbulent colonial past while suggesting its uncertain future and menacing forces that may be at work just beneath the surface.