Jen Liu part of Art Basel Hong Kong's film section 2026
Jen Liu part of Art Basel Hong Kong's film section 2026
Jen Liu will be part of Art Basel Hong Kong's Film section with film 'The Land at The Bottom of The Sea' (2023)
→ 27 - 29 March, 2026
Art Basel, Hong Kong
This film begins with the question: what happens if you are liquidated – financially, socially, politically, environmentally? Under what conditions is it possible to survive? The conditions for labor activism in China have greatly changed since 2016, symptomatic of larger changes in the global economic and political landscape. This film considers these changes as a series of deaths: the death of Chinese labor NGOs, unable to survive in the face of overwhelming governmental force; the death of techno-optimism, unable to provide any solutions to concrete environmental and social problems, and the impending death of a body of artwork, which has been unable to assess future possibilities with any truth. Firsthand accounts of industrial workers and worker poetry are embedded within other nonfiction sources, woven into a melancholic elegy alongside a visual narrative depicting failed social encounters (with mermaids). The elegiac nature of this film is just a candy shell, however:
packed within its digital body is an assembled archive of disappeared women activists, tens of thousands of digital proofs of the existence of fighting women, preserved against the dissolution of memory.
Image: still from film: The Land at The Bottom of The Sea by Jen Liu (2023)