“In Liu’s artist statement, the auteurist nature of filmmakers Maya Deren and Park Chan-wook (Korean director of Joint Security Area, 2000 and Oldboy, 2003) appears perhaps as milestones in her growth as an artist. One can see traces of Deren’s avant-garde films in the way Liu’s work eschews narrative and tries to impart an experience of time and object in her practice. Deren herself sought to free herself from movie conventions in order to explore what critic John Martin called ‘choreocinema’, namely moving images that link the movement of beings with the profile (actual or imagined) of objects. A fluid exchange whereby moderns:
“…discovered that that which seemed simple and stable is, instead, complex and volatile; its own inventions have put into motion new forces, toward which it has yet to invent a new relationship” (Deren 1984)
This presents a slippery world where all things exist in a web of psychological or magical connections. The organic objects in Liu’s practice, things that resist ideas of fixity, work in the same vein. The separation between body and object is erased, making meaning flow both ways between subject and object.”
Leave a Reply