Interlaced with found footage and family archive, Travel Sizes approaches the issue of migration with poetic reasonings. In following the narration of a fictionalized character, the work brings together personal memories and historic narratives, unravelling an affect of being far away from home.
Travel Sizes primarily recycles materials from the Prelinger Archives with a focus on the post-WWII western portrayal of China that was manifested through film productions, commercials, and documentaries. In comparing technologies, social etiquettes, and drastic societal differences between the East and the West, Travel Sizes asks whether history is as objective and nonlinear as it often seems, and more importantly, whose, and which part of the history tend to be foregrounded at the march of time. Drawing also from the University of Victoria's Mathew Ko Colour Films collection, this work brings into view the Chinese Canadian cultural experience based in Vancouver, British Columbia, circa mid-twentieth century.
Travel Sizes is created as the first chapter of the artist’s MFA graduating project at Simon Fraser University. The complete work, a video essay titled Perennial, will be presented in the winter of 2020.
BIOGRAOPHY
Xinyue Liu is a visual artist whose work takes form in film, photography, text, and installation. She is fascinated by the renegotiation of past and present that unfolds when she searches for and handles found objects, lost images and readymade knickknacks. In weaving together fragmented narratives and moving images, Liu’s practice investigates issues of displacement, intimacy and memory. Liu received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Television and Radio Production from Jilin University, China before moving to Vancouver to pursue her graduate study in Interdisciplinary Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her work is inherently informed by her upbringing and familial relationships. As a recipient of the Elsie Jang Fellowship, Liu’s works have also been presented in various venues such as the Vancouver Chinese Film Festival and Canadian Anthropology Society and American Anthropological Association Conference.