At the time of the student demonstrations on Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, Liu Wei was a student at the Beijing University. Before the repression by the Chinese government on 4 June, Liu was able to take photographs that have become evidence of what has remained silenced under the Chinese regime. Floating Memory contains these photographs, along with other image sequences pertaining to Chinese propaganda, the past, the present, and other symbolic scenes. Arranged using bifurcations and superimpositions, the video imitates the way memory works. The beginning of the video shows boy scouts blowing trumpets, political slogans printed on banners, etc. One of the following scenes shows children tracing a line on a wall, a sequence from City of Memory (2000), another video by Liu on the theme of violence in China's education and its affect on the growth of children under the extreme leftist ideology of the Cultural Revolution. The allusion to children – who are allegorical of naivety – forecasts the long years of repressed individual growth due to the violence inherent in China's education system, and political and societal structure. This violence finds its perfect incarnation in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The following shots shift to today's Tiananmen Square pictured in all its prosperity, accompanied by a soundtrack whose lyrics present a cynical take on the capitalist society. The camera focuses on the portrait of Mao smiling down on the Square, wearing, as Liu Wei describes it on the soundtrack, “a pretentious smile”. The prosperous atmosphere gradually fades as the images shift into monotones of grey, and the boisterous music fades. We see a young man with a camera in his hand looking back at the Square. He takes photographs and sees a wall turn fleetingly red at the end of the scene. The rest of the video alternates images of hands sorting through photographs and negatives depicting the events of 1989, with close-ups of certain photographs showing protesting students and their frailty. Interspersed with these are images of the young man looking at the memorial on the Square, lit up in the evening, recalling the eve of the violent repression. Images of the protests, the protagonist, and the Square (where the passers-by are shown walking backwards, as if retracing time), fade in and out, superimposed with images of hands sorting through old photographs and close-ups of a wall (the latter implying dictatorship). Other monotone scenes show a crowd climbing stairs, and a blind man walking with a stick: an anonymous and collective procession in a historical dimension. While the last scenes of fog and falling rain hint at the hazy and dreamy tone of one's memory, as well as the irretrievable past and lost lives, the bold characters on the banner above the students' heads reappear: “We must not die today”.

Sylvie Lin