No One Has Taught Us More Than John
​

Solo exhibition, Magician Space, Beijing, 2026


It is not an exhibition about games, even though we have controllers. Nor is it an exhibition about technology, despite being driven by code. Rather, it is an exhibition about our condition: we are already within the system, and it does not conceal itself. With a hint of irony, it even invites us to reveal its mode of operation — only for us to discover that the very act of revealing is itself part of the system’s operation.


Systems that operate autonomously do not require operators — you may pick up a controller, but your intervention does not bring about essential change. You may act, you may choose, until you are left with nothing but the permission to observe. The “Johns” that appear throughout carry little significance. Here lies perhaps the most important insight: John can be anyone — and no one has taught us more than “anyone.”

→ 没有人比约翰教给我们更多（中文）PDF


→ No One Has Taught Us More Than John (EN) PDF




→ 你在这里无事可做 — 丁大卫


→ 必填项不能为空 — 黄柏然

Wake Up in the Morning
​

2026, suit, digital badge, hanger; single-channel video, colored, silent


Dimensions variable




A suit hangs on the wall, its breast pocket fitted with a small round screen. On it, a face sleeps — breathing, shifting, never waking. The garment awaits its wearer, but the wearer is already elsewhere, caught in a loop of perpetual dormancy. The badge functions as both identifier and window: who is this person, and what system are they dressed for?


📡 Wake Up in the Morning — 日记碎片 / Diary Fragments

Once Upon a Time in America
​

2026, handheld game consoles, custom packaging, text-based adventure game


Dimensions variable




Handheld consoles run an interactive fiction about immigration — a text adventure where every choice leads to the same structural constraints. The player navigates bureaucratic labyrinths, language barriers, and cultural displacements. The game format promises agency; the narrative reveals its limits. You can play, but you cannot change the rules.

Calibrating
​

2026, CRT monitors, computer, controller, interactive webpage


Dimensions variable




Six CRT monitors hang from the ceiling, screens facing down. Each runs a different program: a snake game consuming media theory citations, Tetris blocks named after image formats, a radio drifting between frequencies, a clock switching between obsolete timekeeping systems, a computer that never finishes booting. You may pick up the controller, but your intervention changes nothing essential.


🎮 CRT Tetris / CRT 俄罗斯方块（小游戏示例 / minigame demo）

Must Find a Way to Change the Circumstances
​

2026, office desk, chair, CRT monitor, computer, button, portable monitor, ladder, carpet, wallpaper


Dimensions variable




An office reconstructed as a system interface. A desk, a chair, a monitor — the furniture of productivity arranged as if awaiting an operator. But the system runs autonomously. A button promises intervention; pressing it confirms only that you were there. The room is both workspace and trap, familiar enough to sit in, strange enough to suspect.

Can GPT Dream of a Pink Elephant?
​

Experimental video, 8mm film, colour, sound, 12’22”, 2025


Approximately 4% of the population has aphantasia — an inability to form visual images in the mind’s eye. They understand what an elephant is, what pink is, yet see nothing when they close their eyes. Meanwhile, diffusion models generate images from pure noise in data centers every second. Neuroscience reveals that human imagination works through top-down signals reactivating visual cortex — a process structurally parallel to the denoising in AI image generation. Aphantasia may be precisely this denoising interrupted: the signal is sent but never amplified into conscious awareness.


The film stages a series of quasi-clinical encounters between aphantasic individuals and an AI system, exploring what happens when inner darkness meets synthetic vision. Digital footage is re-filmed on 8mm — a reverse-developing ritual that returns the image to its material fragility.

→ 小陈上一次见到长颈鹿 — fourbeethree.com


→ Back into America — 4beethree


🎮🐍 亚历桑德拉脑内的只言片语 / Fragments in Alexandra’s Mind（小游戏示例 / minigame demo）


🎮🔢 亚历桑德拉的试图抵抗 / Alexandra’s Attempt at Resistance（小游戏示例 / minigame demo）


🎮 Once Upon a Time in America / 美国往事（第一章 / Chapter One）


🎮 Super Alexandra / 超级亚历桑德拉（NES 魔改 / NES mod）

The Second Coming
​

with Huimin Wu, 2025


3 channels video, found footage, AI generation


6480×1080, 24fps, 04’33”




The video is narrated from the perspective of a falling sun god, with text adapted from Yeats’ renowned poem The Second Coming. “The firelight falling from the sky” weaves together the myths of ancient celestial descent and the failures of modern technological experiments, as if civilization’s ascent and collapse are caught in an endless cycle. When fragments of the sun ignite like sparks, and the disintegration of spacecraft reshapes the sky, does each human gaze upward reenact an ancient legend, or attempt to write a new possibility?




The footage was sourced from the documented crash of Musk’s Starship. On January 16, 2025, SpaceX conducted the seventh test flight of Starship in Texas. Though it successfully reached space, it lost contact with the ground within minutes and subsequently disintegrated midair in an explosion. Videos of the falling debris went viral on social media, turning the spectacle of failure into a symbol of romantic grandeur.


→ The Second Coming — mp.weixin.qq.com

Anagāriya




2024


single-channel video, colour, sound, 3D animation


4K, 24fps, 17’56”




The project explores a dialogue between the visualization of geological deep time and unique human actions, unfolding the narrative in the second person, “you.” It weaves together famous excerpts from western travelogues such as The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions and The Account of the Buddhist Kingdoms. Geological time on a grand scale is represented through the imagery of “slow-motion explosions,” corresponding to the sacredness of human spiritual beliefs.

How to Imagine the Unimaginable
​

with Chen Zirui, 2023


double-channel video, colour, sound, AI, 3D animation, found footage


FHD 1920×1080, 25fps, 22’32”




Starting from the personal narrative of restoring childhood dinosaur drawings — traces of imagination formed before language acquisition — the work juxtaposes these with AI-generated images, referencing paleontological reconstruction imagery and dinosaur representations in mass media. The work drifts between restoration and imagination, repair and deviation. As childhood innocence confronts algorithmic coldness, the artists explore what we inherit and what we abandon in the transition from analog imagination to machine imagination. Fiction becomes a speculative language inhabiting the cracks of reality.

Katabasis
​

Solo exhibition, Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, Xiamen, 2023


Curator: Chen Min




The Greek word “Katabasis” often refers to a journey to the underworld. In this exhibition, it points to an act of retreat — the disappearance of the human figure from the story — and to the rewinding of time, a technique prevalent in the world of technical images.


Through a discussion of the manipulability of images, Liu Guangli is actively involved in configuring a model of realism through 3D modeling, CGI, AI-generated art and essay film. By transforming authoritative figures into operational images, he puts heterogeneity into the logic of historicist narratives, deliberately erasing layers depicting the protagonist and the will to triumph over nature, leaving behind the long “history” of inorganic life on earth. The haunting sounds collected from the antimony mines of his hometown, six hundred meters underground, implicitly connect this unimaginable duration with the contemporary history of technological media.

→ Katabasis — PDF


→ 退入地下世界，集美阿尔勒发现奖

A Memo to a Higher Place


2021–2022


Engraved bronze plates


Each plate 64 × 36 cm, 9–12 pieces




Images have become crucial carriers of individual and collective memory today. Yet increasingly mature and accessible image-making technologies also make the production of false images easier than ever, turning the distinction between truth and fabrication into a difficult problem. In A Memo to a Higher Place, images that are real or false, man-made or compiled, are permanently sealed in the same commemorative bronze material. With a playful gesture, the work reminds us of the strangeness of the reality we inhabit, while suggesting that perhaps truth and falsehood have never been the essential question; what matters is the act of commemoration itself.

Your Hands on Mine
​

3D animation, 04’00”, 2022


The nearly 150-year-old custom of using body language to initiate trades among traders was officially put to rest in 2021 with the closing of the Chicago Stock Exchange’s trading floor, becoming a symbol of an entire financial era. Since the dawn of civilization, the relationship between hands and numbers has been ingrained in our trading culture. Even today, many parts of China still bargain in public using the “hand in the sleeve” technique. When the idea of “your hand on mine” takes on the sense of “trading gestures” and draws on the discussion of “dimensionality” in fractal mathematics, it ends up providing a new formula of visual expression to describe “how we use our body to measure and communicate the world through mathematics.”


Director: Guangli Liu / Original Music: Bai Li / Cast: Shan Huang / Camera: Yifan Zhang / VFX Assistant: Zirui Chen

Sitting on My Face
​

Screen recording and 3D animation, 14’41”, 2022


Jade, a Korean-born art student, writes in her diary about encountering anti-Asian racism, sexism, and homophobia in France. Her disillusionment with France, her rage at racists, and the lack of understanding from others all prompted her to reconcile with reality through art.

Crédits :
Figuration : Hyun BAHC
Réalisation : Guangli LIU
Chef opérateur : Zirui CHEN
Chef électricien : Yifan ZHANG
Prise de son : Hongli WANG
Assistante-réalisation : Hélène BOUNTHONG
Interviewer : Nicolas VIMENET
Musique : Bai LI
Montage image : Guangli LIU, Huimin WU
Création 3D : Guangli LIU, Hyun BAHC
Montage son : Hongli WANG
Mixage : Hongli WANG
Graphisme : Huimin WU
Communication du projet : Hélène BOUNTHONG


Remerciements : Annie XIE, Camille SAIGNAVONGS, Jeon JIN


Production :
Association des Jeunes Chinois de France (AJCF),
Réseau de recherche « Migrations de l’Asie de l’Est et du Sud-Est en France » (MAF)
Centre de recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé, Santé Mentale, Société (CERMES3)
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)


Dans le cadre de la Recherche-Action REACTAsie (Octobre 2020 - Septembre 2022)

« L’expérience des discriminations et du racisme des personnes d’origine asiatique - de l’Asie de l’Est et du Sud-Est - en France »

Financement : Défenseur des Droits

One of the metaphor of ‘photogrammetry’ is that the look we cast on the object forms what we see. In other words, the way we see decides what we see. The gesture of prayer is split from different cultural background and reflects the original commitment between the body and the universe. When reproducing statues that have been translated (for example, Chinese craftsman copying the Holy Mother of God), the digital error that arise from the operation of photogrammetry and 3D printing is amplified and reserved, indicating the inevitable misconception brought by language.

Antimony Capital News

DCP, 21’27”, 2019

Lengshuijiang, a small city in the heart of Hunan Province, was established since its “Xikuangshan mine” contains the world’s largest deposit of antimony and was once known as “the antimony capital of the world.” During the two world wars, this isolated land in the middle of the mountains exported nearly 80 percent of the world’s antimony products.

Antimony Capital News was originally a documentary news broadcast by the local television station in Lengshuijiang. In this film, some of the original footage from early days of the program is intertwined with the footage depicting the film set of the documentary The Local Records of China - The Chapter of Lengshuijiang, attempting to creat a “timeless” narrative. Under a certain specific kind of ideology, the reality and continuity of the genre of “news” no longer exist, leaving behind images that say nothing other than the process of its own birth. Thus, the present moment is always absent.

In 2009, Lengshuijiang was officially considered a “resource-depleted” city by the State Council, only forty years after its foundation.

Credits:
Original script: Guangli LIU 刘广隶
Image: Guangli LIU, Hao LIU, Zhipeng ZHOU 刘广隶，刘颢，周志鹏
Voice: Wei FANG, Haolei WU 方巍，吴浩雷
Editing: Benoit MÉRY, Guangli LIU 刘广隶
Film score composer: Bai LI 李白
Sound Designer: Martin DELZESCAUX
Sound Editing: Martin DELZESCAUX, Florent BOURGAIN
Artistic accompaniment: Bing WANG 王兵

Technical information:
Location : Lengshuijiang, Hunan, China
Video Format: Digital cinema (high resolution digital cameras), HD, 16mm
DCP: yes - 25 fps
Process : colour
Frame format / Image ratio : 4/3=1.33
Sound format / Ratio : Dolby Digital 5.1
Sound version: Dialogues, Voice over
Language of the original version: Chinese
Subtitle language: French, English

Production / Distribution : Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains
Responsable du projet : François Bonenfant
Chargé de production : Guylaine HUET
Contact : Natalia Trebik, Responsable de la diffusion des oeuvres
Adresse bureaux : 22, rue du Fresnoy 59200 Tourcoing
Tél. : 03 20 28 38 64 / Fax : 03 20 28 38 99
Mail : ntrebik@lefresnoy.net
Site : www.lefresnoy.net + www.panorama21.net

The micro-carving necklace is a popular online token of love that allows consumers to place photos or texts in the center of the necklace to demonstrate their feelings to their beloved, and sellers often advertise these products with a tagline like “100 Languages I Love You.”This “I Love You” necklace consumerizes the act of looking. After the gaze, people click and buy, a practice of promise that is fluid and light. Yet what is reflected in the token is nothing other than the lover himself or herself.


The artist has ordered a collection of ‘Martyrdom of the Cross’ necklaces, placing in them a series of images from the history of the spread of Catholicism in China: paintings depicting the martyrdom of European missionaries in the Far East, localized biblical illustrations from books published in the Ming and Qing dynasties, or porcelains Jesus ordered by Europeans and portrayed by Chinese artists during the time of Canton’s Thirteen Factories. This collection of necklaces is branded as IYESU, pronounced in Chinese as “Love Jesus”, which can also be disassembled as I YES U. Faith is reduced to a consumable promise while devotion to love and faith becomes a performance of the subject’s reassertion of the self within his or her own system of representation.

In the summer of 2016, in order to host the G20 summitin Hangzhou, all construction sites were suspended for almost one year. I sneaked into a nearly completed community, entered one of the apartments, and left some words about art on the wall for the future owner, but I removed “art” from those sentences.