Simon Liu - Visiting Speaker

Simon Liu is a film maker who collects materials for his work, from the places of his origin (Hong Kong, Stoke on Trent - UK and Brooklyn - New York). In his talk Liu spoke of how his work involves very 'labour intensive projects'. The most recent of which is a project entitled 'E-Ticket', which involves mixed media photographs and 16000 splices of film. Liu worked with 35mm still photographs and spliced some of the negatives together with tape in order to show the contrast between sentimentality vs a disregard for images.

Here is an example of a photograph in this film:

Liu said that 'E-Ticket' is his adaption of 'Dantes Inferno' and each photograph in this film lasts for 1/24th of a second, meaning that the images fly by so quickly, that the viewer doesn't have a chance to appreciate them. Additionally for this project he spent 3 months splicing images together and then 1 month editing those images. 

I really like how Liu works with mixed media and how he splices different photographs together to gain these visual results. The way that the colours blend and then contrast with each other, really captures the view of the audience as there is so much to take away from watching one of his films.

Finally Liu said that he is 'interested in the idea of having so much work at once that the audience have to choose what they look at'. A key example of this in his work is when he does live performances, as he sometimes sets up multiple projectors with his films and then overlays the projected films on the wall.

Here is a further example of his work: