Cinematic Involutions

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.