Cinematic Involutions

ON VIEW FROM OCTOBER 17, 2025–December 21, 2025

Cinematic Involutions brings together six recent moving-image works (2019–2024) by four international artists—Simon Liu, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Tulapop Saenjaroen, and Yuyan Wang—who turn inward to explore the recursive, self-processing nature of images. The exhibition asks: why make moving images now? In an age marked by political silencing, fractured memory, and digital overstimulation, these artists reveal how the motion of cinema itself can become an act of resistance, reflection, and renewal. Through gestures of repetition, dissolution, and transformation, their works consider how movement—within both bodies and screens—can generate new forms of life and attention.

Dwelling in the recursive rhythms of cinema, the artists of Cinematic Involutions transform loops, glitches, and repetitions into generative acts. From the tactile explorations of slime in Yuyan Wang and Tulapop Saenjaroen’s works to Simon Liu’s dense montage of everyday imagery and Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi’s cinematic storytelling, each artist offers a distinct engagement with the vitality and instability of the moving image. Together, their works propose that by looking deeper—into the motions that sustain and unsettle us—we might glimpse cinema not as a closed system, but as a living, breathing ecology of relation.

The exhibition is curated by Toby Wu, 2025 Graduate Curatorial Fellow, and Danni Shen, Senior Curatorial and Public Programs Assistant. 

The Aux: Intermedia Gallery was made possible by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA) and the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies.

Simon Liu (b. 1987, Hong Kong) is an artist filmmaker whose practice centers on the rapidly evolving psychological and sociopolitical landscapes of his homeland of Hong Kong through material abstraction, speculative history, and subversion of documentary cinema practices via short films, multi-channel video installations, mixed media prints, and 16mm projection performances. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Biennial 2024, Museum of Modern Art, MOCA Los Angeles, The Shed, PICA, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Museum of the Moving Image, Everson Museum, Moderna Museet, "Dreamlands: Expanded", and the M+ Museum. His films have screened at festivals globally including the Toronto, New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, BFI London, Edinburgh, Jeonju, and Hong Kong International Film Festivals alongside the Sundance Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, CPH:DOX, Cinéma du Réel, Punto de Vista, Viennale, and the Media City Film Festival. The M+ Museum and MoMA recently acquired Liu’s Quadruple 16mm Projection Highview, along with other recent works, for their Permanent Collections. He is currently editing his first feature film, Staffordshire Hoard. He lives and works in New York City.  

Tulapop Saenjaroen (b. 1986, Chon Buri, Thailand) is an artist and filmmaker whose practice encompasses performance, sound, and moving image. His recent works interrogate the correlations between image production and production of subjectivity as well as the paradoxes intertwining control and freedom in late capitalism. In combining narrative and the essay film genre, he investigates subjects such as tourism, self-care, mental illness, free labor, power relation in storytelling, metaphysics, and cinema itself through re-making and re-interpreting the produced images and their networks. Saenjaroen received his MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, and MA in Aesthetics and Politics from CalArts. Saenjaroen’s works have been shown in film festivals, screenings, exhibitions, internationally including Berlinale, Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Cinéma du réel (Paris), International Film Festival Rotterdam, DOK Leipzig; International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; Images Festival (Toronto), European Media Art Festival, e-flux screening room, Ghost 2565: Live Without Deadtime; M+ (Hong Kong), REDCAT, Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), 100 Tonson Gallery, Harvard Film Archive, Abandon Normal Devices (UK); among many other venues. Saenjaroen lives and works in Bangkok.

Yuyan Wang (b. 1989, China) is a filmmaker and video artist. Her works involve recycled materials from the industrial sphere of image production, tracing their mutation and proliferation within the digital frameworks and representations. Through the editing process, Wang deconstructs and recontextualizes the intricate hierarchies and inherent meanings in materials —whether found, processed, and produced—striping symbols of their conventional paths of perception and turning them into immersive sensory experiences. Wang completed her studies at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016 and later at Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains in 2022. Her work has been showcased at Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, UCCA Beijing, the 12th Berlin Biennale and various festivals, such as the Berlinale International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMa Doc Fortnight, CPH:DOX, the European Media Art Festival, receiving numerous awards. She lives and works in Paris. 

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi is a Milky Way-based artist whose practice mutates in and out of film, sculpture, installation, performance, and interdisciplinary research. Collaborating with characters in search of consciousness, language, and freedom, her recent body of work explores the aesthetic, political, and epistemological possibilities of image and sound. Nguyen-Chi's work has been presented in art and cinema contexts, including Berlin Biennale; Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art; Belvedere 21, Vienna; De Appel, Amsterdam; Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, Los Angeles; Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden; Villa Medici, Rome; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Copenhagen International Documentary Festival; Montréal Festival International du Film sur l'Art; New York Film Festival; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; Reykjavík International Film Festival; and Singapore International Film Festival. In 2023, she was included among the 20 New Talents in Art in America, nominated for the New:Vision Award1, and awarded the Jury Grand Prix2 and Golden Lola3 for Into The Violet Belly. Having studied Fine Arts at the Städelschule and Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she is currently a PhD researcher at the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media at the University of Westminster and was formerly a fellow of the Junge Akademie at the Academy of Arts. 

About the Curator

Toby Wu is a writer, curator and PhD Student in the department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He researches Modern and Contemporary Art in the Transpacific through elemental media theory, specifically Southeast Asia towards East Asia and North America. His research and curatorial interests lie in the notion of substrates across mediums (paper, lacquer, celluloid and sculpture), or rather volumetric forms which necessitate consideration of an object’s environmental constitution. 

Two Sequences, One Impulse 

Cinematic Involutions turns to six recent moving-image works (spanning 2019–2024) by four international artists, Simon Liu, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Tulapop Saenjaroen and Yuyan Wang; all steeped in the recursive currents of their image ecologies, stubbornly invested in parsing and creating images from within. It questions—Why study and make moving images? In times of political silencing, the suppression of memory, physical isolation and enervation, can simply dwelling in the motion of moving images be adjacent to other means of protest and circulation? 

In Yuyan Wang’s One Thousand and One Attempts to be An Ocean, and Tulapop Saenjaroen’s Squish!, human hands delve into the unending wonder of non-Newtonian fluid—Slime. Leaking–Piercing–Melding; appendages seeking to enfold and enter, agitating its viscosity with variegated stressing. We keep watching, enthralled by the gruesome yet satisfying recreation of substance our fleshly selves could never become.  

This intuitively gratifying aesthetic of Plasticity is fundamentally distinct from the promises of capitalist elasticity- the idea that one could, and should, become flexible to meet the demands of productivity. [1] Plasticity reaches beyond mere physiological and ideological flexibility. It is, as philosopher Catherine Malabou writes, “genius”: an innate ability to receive, give, and even destroy form [2]—simultaneously allowing oneself to be shaped by this creative force. Resisting the demands of self-commodification, the artistic practices in this exhibition emerge in the abundance of plasticity—a capacity to shape and be shaped by one’s surroundings. Even in moments of inward withdrawal and stillness, or the appearance of non-movement, in Involution, plastic motion can be found. 

Instead of clamoring for ownership over new images or visual forms, these artists reflect on what it means to maintain boundaries that distinguish their work from the endless production and flow of images circulating around us. They work through the fear of an intensified visual surveillance economy and desire to metabolize all the images we dwell in. These artists do so reflexively, using the inherited language and tensions of cinema. In their range of strategies across analogue materials and digital spheres, forgotten Cinema histories, found footage and fabulation, they cut through the grain of image proliferation to dwell in not-yet-resolved questions. They employ and syncopate cinematic movement to pierce the impositions of authoritarianism—that which dictates what we feel, and what is worth feeling.  

 Insistent Involution  

Recursion is thus not simple but expanded reproduction; it brings together repetition and variation with the goal of producing something new that cannot be executed in advance. 

— Hartmut Winkler [3] 

While the term Involution carries many philological and disciplinary implications, at its core it describes a turning inward—something that can appear, from the outside, as a loss of vitality or effectiveness. It suggests a kind of curling or folding in on oneself: a coiling, an entangling, a clouding over brought on by overwhelm—not unlike the merging of flesh and slime. As with judgments about what counts as “productive” or “flexible,” the term involution has often been shaped by external perspectives and systems of value. In anthropology, for instance, what began as descriptions of deepening complexity or repetition in “other” cultural practices as observed by anthropologists were eventually read as signs of stagnation or failed progress. [4] Specifically, involution is a declaration of failed modernism, a deviation from the intended trajectory towards synchronized, stable and productive form. In this lineage, involution becomes not just a turning inward, but a denouncement of working inwardly—a movement directed toward interior worlds rather than outward displays of innovation or industrial growth. Even today, the contemporary Chinese internet term neijuan (literally “to curl inward”) propagates this ideology, marking inward motion as something futile from the start. 

There is no direct corollary for the term Involution within the discipline of Cinema Studies, yet the medium of moving images is itself deeply invested in reflexive recursion. In its well documented drive to reproduce itself, its self-referential nature, and its penchant for nostalgia, [5] this involution begins with enchantment by the sheer possibility of motion. [6] Through cinema’s material antecedents in the spiraling Phenakistoscope [7]—Cinema is set in motion with a lineage of involuting spectacle, one driven by inertia and ultimately leading to diminishing returns. Even without considering the many exit points from this spiraling motion [8]—this inertia gives rise to other seemingly involuted forms of making and watching and circulation, most notably in the fields of video art. [9] This can lead to a kind of emotional intolerance when we encounter images tailored so specifically to us, to the point that we only value those that openly monitor or surveil us. [10] It seems we cannot escape this condition: the cinematic force born from putting images into motion cannot be fully stabilized, controlled, or harnessed. 

Rather than surrendering to the overwhelming intersecting crosshairs of Cinema and Involution, Cinematic Involutions focuses on the internal operations within the recursive motions of being entangled with moving images. Drawing on media theory and the language of computer programming, we can see recursions as ‘repetitive instances of self-processing that nonetheless result in something different.’ [11] In Cinematic Involution, what might seem like listless self-reference—or the primordial moving image looping back on itself—is actually cinematic motion tracing the spaces between the aesthetics of Plasticity and what literary critic Sianne Ngai describes as Animatedness. [12] It grapples with the potential for movement under the deceptive guises of flexibility, finding creativity in the latent capacity to be enlivened through animation—which itself conveys liveliness only through external intervention. It is the Baradian agential cut placing motion within movement—not granting freedom or full self-possession but offering a way to tide through the many demands the world places upon us. 

The artists of Cinematic Involutions each engage in life-bearing work, parsing plastic motion from mere flexible movement, beyond the evident ingenuity of their creative capacities. In the midst of things, whether in the deceptive surplus of visual representation in Simon Liu’s E-Ticket and the vacating of image-form in Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi’s fields of blue in Into The Violet Belly; in the churning of online videos in Yuyan Wang’s works and the multi-temporal spiraling in Tulapop Saenjaroen’s works, they help us sense the diffractive rhythms of Cinema —rhythms that give way to other forms of motion, and therefore life. While there are many ways to intervene in our environs and the images that circulate within them, these artists model how burrowing deeper within what we already see and feel is not just worthwhile, but essential.