Homesick for Another World
by Mei Liu
Research & project
Stemming from contemporary China’s tightening of political imagination, and the wide-spread political depression among youths, Homesick for Another World is an artistic research that explores how oppressed bodies can emancipate themselves from the desolate reality and find freedom and hope through creating solidarity, dreaming, imagining and accessing other existing dimensions.
Mei Liu uses lucid dreaming as a writing method as well as a narrative device, engaging with speculative fiction as a political and aesthetic statement. She attempts to use the language of the speculative to build an indirect, poetic relation to suppressed memories and erased histories, to entangle different dimensions of the past and future, creating space for a more liberating relation with collective traumas.
After collecting first-hand archives, oral histories and dreams of previously confined individuals, Her feature-length fiction film Homesick for Another World (in development) will dive into the imagination and dreams of the confined protagonist in a sensorial, meditative and hypnotic cinematic journey. The documentary-esque realist scenes will transform into otherworldly imagery, as if entering into the character’s psyche brimming with hallucinations, fears, hopes and longings for another world. The seemingly incongruous swarms of moving images will not illustrate dreams but embody the amalgamation of conflicting experiences and voices, unveiling their complexities and mysteries.
In her expanded cinema performance ‘The Weight of Images’, she holds a piece of paper upon which moving images are projected. She attempts to give presence to the weight that are inherent to moving images, and the stakes it takes to hold space for them.
Mei is now inviting more people to join her research process, participating in her co-dreaming workshops, and co-creating the worlds in the film. You can read more about her process and the project in her research publication The Universe is a Donut and You’re Starving.
Visual Abstract Artistic Research
Mei Liu
Mei Liu is a filmmaker and artist from Shanghai, now based in Amsterdam. She received her BFA in Film Production from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and is a Master of Film candidate in Artistic Research in and through Cinema at the Netherlands Film Academy. She also participated in the Apichatpong Weerasethakul film lab in the Amazon jungle.
Her short films have been shown at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival among others. Her video installation work has been exhibited in Jogja-Netpac Asian Film Festival, Indonesia.
Mei strives to create new filmmaking spaces that disrupt existing hierarchies and interactions in society. She develops a ‘film yoga’ practice to gain spiritual insights through mindful filmmaking. She co-founded Cenote (originally Cenote Workshop) — a collaborative art project from China, researching on Spiritual Activism through socially engaged art practice.
Her latest project Homesick for Another World delves into confinement and lucid dreaming, exploring the power of dreaming and imagination within oppressed bodies.
When reality gets so absurd, it slips away from our usual vocabulary, melting into an expression that can only be contained by ways of the speculative, and decoded by the language of dreams.