Liu Yujia

Liu Yujia
The Koh Larn Island
2017
Single Channel HD Video  
Color，Sound  
14’47”  

THE KOHLARN ISLAND (2017), shot in Thailand, showcases Liu’s high level of authorial control. It reveals playful experimentation and heavy pathos as Liu stages mobile scenes with a local, masked drifter as he tows a giant inflatable swan behind a motorcycle. The protagonist’s voiceover in English gives an account of his downward spiral and unfortunate descent into vagrancy. He navigates the contours of beaches in uncertainty and disillusionment, and the swan becomes a fantastical element that remains present but rather humorously unacknowledged as a narrative device. Like the beach itself as a boundary between the flux of the ocean and the fixity of a continent, the swan comes to embody a phantasmagorical tableau between a semi-staged fiction and an elusive reality.

About Liu Yujia:
Liu Yujia currently lives and works in Beijing. Her recent practice engages with moving images. Her video works and films explore the dialectical tension between documentary reality and fiction, examining the complex and mysterious dimensions of subjective experience in different social and political contexts.