Guangli Liu
When the sea sends forth a forest - Film - 20min - 2020
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 22
Film
Under the regime of Khmer Rouge led by the Communist Party of Cambodia, 1.5 to 3 million people died abnormally nationwide from 1975 to the beginning of 1979, accounting for about a quarter of the country’s population at that time, among whom about 200,000 were of Chinese origin. The turmoil in Southeast Asia in the 75s led to the influx of refugees into Europe, and according to statistics, France alone received 150,000 refugees, among whom about a half were of Chinese origin. Today, about 3 million overseas Chinese live in Europe.
During the reign of the Khmer Rouge, the whole country was blocked, leaving very few images. As a result, we constructed a collective imagination of the lost history based on two extreme narrations—the propaganda videos during the Khmer Rouge period and the disaster videos spread in the world after the fall of the regime, making history become a virtual reality in imagination.
The narration starts with the memory of an old Chinese who experienced the tragedy, the real-time simulation and making of the 3D shows this process of reconstruction of memory, which becomes a subjective imagination and continues to produce the present. The contrast between the archive footage and the 3d reconstruction shows the role of the medium itself in telling a story and how the medium interweaves with our memory and history in documenting human conditions and traumas.
Guangli Liu
Guangli Liu is a Chinese artist born in 1990. After studying mechanical design and automation for a year he switched to digital media. This change of direction eventually brought him to France, where he graduated cum laude from Villa Arson, Nice, in 2017. Fascinated by technology, he has developed a practice based around video, 3D animation and painting. His work creates virtual worlds in an attempt to question the way the computer medium interweaves with contemporary narrative and the reconstruction of our collective memory.
Production
Partner
Acknowledgments
Madeleine Van Doren, Daniel Dobbels, Massimiliano Simbula, Anna Katharina Scheidegger, Wen-liang Su, Sachinda Chonda, Clément Mouly, Davy Chou, Chea Sopheap, Na Wang, Yu Shi, Liang Yi, Yijian Zheng ; Centre Bophana, INA (Institut national de l'audiovisuel)
