Overview

In an environment with mirrored walls that create infinite reflections, a video plays in an EVD. This all-in-one home entertainment system was produced in the early 2000s in China as a progressive device with the aim to allow hearing-impaired people to “see music”. Soon considered outdated, this sophisticated instrument ended up in remote rural areas of Sichuan where the artist noticed it while conducting field research in ethnomusicology. Recalling a dashboard for space navigation in a science-fiction film, it inspired him with a dreamlike narrative, suspended between past and future. Liu references major Western SciFi movies, the chants of ethnic minorities from the South-East of China and the sudden arrival of pop music in Hong Kong, in the 1980. Between the vernacular and the urban, the artist ponders the powers of magic, utopia and disappearance.