Open Call: Simon Liu

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. Through obliquely overlapping narratives, a relentlessly evolving array of 16mm images layer representations of the city’s diverse atmospheres, ranging from studies of lush urban spectacle to ominous sites of social tension and unrest. Moving in concert with an overwhelming soundtrack, the work oscillates between wonderment in the seemingly mundane, searches for intimacy, and a nagging anxiety that now hangs over daily life in the metropolis. Accompanying a multitude of screens and projected images, a web of phantom-like reflections and beams of colored light emanate through the space, attempting to capture an impassioned attachment to a city and its people that can never be fully embraced in a single instant. By interrogating highly subjective experiences in the context of a seemingly insurmountable and irreversible change in the political and cultural fabric of his native city, Liu creates a site of remembrance for a time and place that may never be as it was.