Negotiating disappearance: Protective abstraction in Simon Liu’s quasi-protest trilogy

Abstract

The simultaneous phenomena of the political upheaval in Hong Kong and Sinophobia in the United States produce a double bind for diasporic artists working about and between Hong Kong, China and the United States. Hong Kong diaspora filmmaker Simon Liu navigates this political landscape through experiments in abstract film as a medium for documenting protest and urban transformation sans spectacle. This article locates Liu’s work in the transnational matrix of Hong Kong’s post-colonial non-sovereignty and American Sino-diaspora politics to analyse the ways in which the filmmaker’s diasporic positioning necessitates abstraction and to demonstrate the potential of abstraction as an apparatus for geopolitically vulnerable subjects to continuously deconstruct and re-establish their subjectivity under political conditions that threaten their erasure. I posit that abstraction in Liu’s quasi-protest trilogy – consisting of Signal 8, Happy Valley and Devil’s Peak – offers a sensory orientation for finding blind spots between recognition and indecipherability, opening up new ways of documenting a crisis through the disarticulation of discrete events into atmospheric conditions.