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.
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.
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.
