Image Director Tina Liu on Materialism: Tina’s Story of Things

In the age of the internet and increasing (dis-)connectedness, human are surrounded by an excess of material things that simultaneously suffocates and alienates us. In April, Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Cultural Studies and Creative Industries of Division of Arts and Languages invited Ms. Tina Liu, an image director, a curator, an editor, to share her take on things — as embodiment of beauty, memory, and culture.

Tina began to trace her personal relationship with things from her late father’s writings, to vintage brooches, buttons, powder cases, handbags collected throughout the years, delicate chopstick rests she purchased on a trip to Japan, old books and magazines from across the world, and childhood recordings of her daughter Yoyo’s. She loves these things — collectibles — for their beauty and, more importantly, how they are, each alone, the crystallisation of a singular moment in an epoch.

But her love of things extends beyond the personal. In 2023, she and a few other friends at the Hong Kong Film Arts Association put together an exhibition, Out of Thin Air, that showcased the sets and costumes from notable local movies, old and new. This year, Tina is working on another project of a similar nature: sorting out the costume archives for the Shaw Studios. To her, these are more than historical relics; they are the very fabric on which the dreams and culture of a people were woven. To quote Bill Brown (2001), “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us,” rearranging film props is not to resurrect them, but to remember and reimagine the many ways that they have enlivened us.

At the end of the sharing, Tina showed the collages and tea eggs snack that she made for fun, “My friends once persuaded me to sell the tea eggs at their consignment shop, but it was too much pressure that it would drain all the fun.” Perhaps, beyond all talk of grandiosity, human relationship with things are but a grounding sense of playfulness that affirms the truest and most basic of our humanity: to have and to hold.