Rachael Lawe

Refuse Room

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.

Happy Valley

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.

Signal 8

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.

E-Ticket

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.