The Mystery of the World: Short films by Liu Guangli

LIU Guangli 刘广隶 was born in 1990 in Lengshuijiang, China. He currently lives and works in Paris. He graduated from Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains in 2020. Guangli’s works often grow out of the slit of different approaches to depicting history and events, and eventually find their own places in installations, videos, documentaries, and paintings that suggest that our understanding of the present is often shaped by pre-existing languages, social norms, and media formats where pieces of information get transmitted.

锑都新闻 Antimony Capital News

27mins, 2019, China

Liu Guangli

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Lengshuijiang, a small city in the heart of Hunan Province, was established since its “Xikuangshan mine” contains the world’s largest deposit of antimony and was once known as “the antimony capital of the world.” During the two world wars, this isolated land in the middle of the mountains exported nearly 80 percent of the world’s antimony products.

Antimony Capital News was originally a documentary news broadcast by the local television station in Lengshuijiang. In this film, some of the original footage from early days of the program is intertwined with the footage depicting the film set of the documentary The Local Records of China - The Chapter of Lengshuijiang, attempting to creat a “timeless” narrative. Under a certain specific kind of ideology, the reality and continuity of the genre of “news” no longer exist, leaving behind images that say nothing other than the process of its own birth. Thus, the present moment is always absent.

In 2009, Lengshuijiang was officially considered a “resource-depleted” city by the State Council, only forty years after its foundation.

直到海里长出森林 When the Sea Sends Forth a Forest

21mins, 2020, France

Liu Guangli

“It was 1974, war had lasted for years…” So begins the memory of an old Chinese man who lived through the regime of the Khmer Rouge led by the Communist Party of Cambodia. The tightly controlled Cambodian media left very few images between 1975 and 1979. This was a time when millions of people died unnecessarily and about 200,000 were people of Chinese descent. Guangli Liu’s film is a collective imagination of that lost history based on propaganda videos and the disaster videos which spread throughout the world after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Narrated through the autobiographical voice, a tender, personal history unfurls as a virtual reality of an imagined recent past. Detailing the human condition and traumas of the dispossessed. The contrast between the archive footage and the 3D reconstruction shows the role of the experimental digital as it interweaves memory with history into the universal of being human. (Jutta Schmiederer)

坐在我脸上 Sitting on My Face

14mins, 2022, France/China

Liu Guangli

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Jade, a Korean-born art student, writes in her diary about encountering anti-Asian racism, sexism, and homophobia in France. Her disillusionment with France, her rage at racists, and the lack of understanding from others all prompted her to reconcile with reality through art.

如何想象不可想象之物 How to Imagine the Unimaginable

23mins, 2023, China

Liu Guangli&Chen Zirui

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Now I understand that the more completely the dinosaurs were annihilated, the wider their domain extended. They not only controlled the forests that covered the continents, but also penetrated into the depths of human thought that remained on Earth. Starting from the ancient, fear and doubt inducing ancestors, they continuously stretched out their necks and raised their claws, expanding their domain.（Calvino "The Dinosaurs."）