Screening x Panel Discussion: Liu Yujia on recent art practice

Time: 2018 June 2, Saturday, 19:00-21:00
Venue: 1F CREATER SPACE, No.888 Huashan Road, Shanghai

Arthub is so honored to have invited Liu Yujia to our online screening program and Exhibition on the Table. For this occasion, we will team up with the curator Chao Jiaxing for a offline screening event of Liu Yujia’s two recent artworks, and talk about her recent art practice.

Screening Line-up:
Black Ocean,
The Koh Larn Island

Panelists:
Liu Yujia, Chao Jiaxing

Language:
Chinese, English

RSVP:
Please send your name and contact to info@arthub.bestbit.it

Introduction of the movie

Black Ocean (2016) pictures the human landscape destroyed as well as in construction, and its fragility as well as indestructibility. The structure of storytelling of this film is inspired by the novel Invisible Cities (1972) of Italian writer Italo Calvino. Several chapters are interwoven with the debate and inquiry raised by Marco Polo and Kublai Khan about their imagined city and landscape in this film. It provides an entrance to allow the audience to get in, to wander, to get lost, and to find an exit or several ones somewhere at some time.

The Koh Larn Island (2017), shot recently in Thailand, and represents Liu ’ s greatest degree of authorial control. It reveals playful experimentation and heavy pathos as Liu stages mobile scenes with a local, masked drifter as he tows a giant inflatable swan behind a motorcycle. The protagonist’s voiceover in English gives an account of downward spiral and unfortunate descent into vagrancy. He navigates the contours of beaches in uncertainty and disillusionment, and the swan becomes a fantastical element that remains present but rather humorously unacknowledged as a narrative device. Like the beach itself as a boundary between the flux of the ocean and the fixity of a continental landmass, the swan comes to embody a phantasmagorical tableau between a semi-staged fiction and an elusive reality.