in conversation_Simon Liu x Tiffany Sia

22MAY2025 SHOCK STUDIES_a new expanded cinema performance by Simon Liu. Featuring an intricate network of analogue projection, handmade electronics, live sound, and reflective materials, the work examined the problematics of nostalgia, representations of prohibited spaces, and the boundaries of control within an increasingly automated world.

In this conversation, artist Tiffany Sia and filmmaker Simon Liu discuss Simon’s expanded cinema performance Let’s Talk, contextualizing it within the sociopolitical transformations in Hong Kong since 2019. Liu reflects on themes of estrangement, memory, and control, shaped by his inability to return to Hong Kong during the protests and pandemic. The work departs from direct political documentation, instead using abstraction and formal experimentation to convey affective dislocation.

Liu employs analog projectors, power strips, and custom electronics to construct precarious, gesture-driven audiovisual systems. These methods embrace failure and improvisation, mirroring broader political anxieties and the complexities of mediated experience. The conversation underscores how Liu’s practice navigates emotional intensity through formal complexity, with repetition and reconfiguration serving as strategies for reflection, disruption, and reinvention across time and context.

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Selected quote by 99 Canal’s team:

I think I try, every two years, I try and switch up my game quite drastically. Whenever I feel as though I'm getting comfortable or confident with the way I'm working with something, it feels as though a way in which making the work feels perfunctory. Part of making the work for me is to just feel as though I created a problem that just feels kind of out of my control, and the process of making it feels as though I'm just trying to solve that problem.

Simon Liu

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TRANSCRIPT
recorded on 21.05.2025

Tiffany Sia Um, first of all—you lied to me. You said, “Sometime in the evening,” and I thought, like any reasonable human being, that meant six o’clock. Then it was, “Oh no, the performance starts at nine, because it gets dark at nine.” And now—where are we? We’re inching toward ten. So you’re getting a very different version of me right now. So this is going to be way, way more casual. Hong Kong time.

I'm a morning person. I wake up at like six, six thirty, how dare you take me away from my bed?

[laughs]

Simon Liu I’m very sorry…

TS No, but really—I’m honored to be here and excited to be in conversation with you. The first time we met—we talked about this on the phone—we tried not to get into too much of this ahead of time, but it was actually in Hong Kong back in early 2019. That was before the protests had begun, roughly five or six months before?

SL Yeah, it was January 8, 2019.

TS Which is really weird that you remember the exact date.

SL Well, you know, our dear friend (taking a video right now) was in Hong Kong at the time, with another friend of ours. And I met you that day—I flew back to New York two days afterwards, and I remember this being this very important day in my life in a lot of ways, because the next time I went back was when the protests had started, and so many things had started to change.

TS Did you shoot Signal Eight then?

SL Yeah, I was shooting it then. I just remember that June 8, 2019 was really one of the last days where there wasn't all of this, you know, this baggage of what had happened that was hanging over everything. I mean, it's such a beautiful day, and that June 8, 2019 will always stick with me in that way.

TS Yeah, I remember that really clearly. Josh (in the audience) was doing a residency at this space I was running—Speculative Place. I don’t think you ever ended up going, but I had found this random house in the outer part of Hong Kong, and Josh was staying there and shooting with a gas mask on because he was paranoid about the smog. Justifiably so, I should say, it was very smoggy. But yeah, I just wanted to link Signal Eight to this work, because I see it very much in that trajectory. I'm kind of curious to talk to you about that, because it's sort of an exploded version of Signal 8. But I don't get the sense that this work is about Hong Kong anymore, and I kind of want to talk to you about what that might mean.