Simon Liu’s Splits in Two (2026) opens with a man hunched over a sink, leaning into a mirror. For a second, the Chinese characters 自由 (“freedom”) are visible in the corner of the glass, inscribed in what could be red lipstick, before he shifts and the words disappear. As he straightens, so does his reflection, the two figures cleaving apart along a shared axis; behind him, his shadow magnifies his motion against a grimy wall. There are three of this man in the frame before the first cut: corporeal, specular, spectral. Despite the work’s title, Liu’s “split” is not binary but tripartite, a logic echoed in the installation itself: three screens arranged in a triangle, running the film simultaneously across outward facing surfaces. Narrow gaps between the panels bleed light, casting prismatic, restless shadows on the floor. 

The scene ends with the man slowly turning around, breaking the fourth wall. From there, the film launches into a careening, convulsive, yet oddly graceful montage of hyperkinetic imagery, its perspective traversing the city like a schizophrenic specter: from domestic interiors to skyscraper façades glistening in the sun, from parks to graveyards to shimmering waterfronts. The camera alights briefly—barely—on traffic signs, tangerine peels, a balcony adorned with billowing laundry, only to jerk, jump-cut, or cascade into the next frame, each image flashing then disappearing, never dwelling. The incoherence is visceral, most acutely for the Hong Kong viewer, for whom the fractured mélange is unheimlich—strange because it feels too intensely familiar. The city will not be held; the footage darts, dodges, doubles back, then dissolves at the precipice of decipherability, enacting the gap between knowing a place and being able to claim it, between subjecthood and the conditions under which it may be affirmed.