Zirui Liu

About

Zirui Liu is a visual experimental designer from RCA. She specialises in discovering the often overlooked details of everyday life and historical events, while delving into the contradictions and complexities that exist within them. Through a carefully constructed narrative, she presents the feelings of the event and leads the audience to think about it.

Zirui hopes to raise the audience's awareness and consideration of the world through her subtle expressions, connecting the overlooked with the social and cultural issues behind them, thus making people re-examine their own values and behaviour.


Contact

Degree Details

Statement

The Parrot comes from the disappearance of Limehouse Chinatown, a historical Chinese immigrant community in London. In the 20th century, influenced by the Yellow Peril ideology, fictional works and portrayals of Limehouse Chinatown became increasingly widespread. Novels centered around 'Limehouse Nights' fueled the construction of an unknown, dangerous, and exotic space, this negative imaginings of opium, gambling, crime, and other vices, ultimately marginalizing and erasing the Limehouse Chinese community.

This project aims to recreate the manifestations of the Yellow Peril ideology in Western popular culture, exploring the challenges faced by ethnic minority immigrants in cultural distortion, and fostering reflection on the inclusivity among diverse racial and multicultural communities.

The Parrot

Room(1)
Room(1)
Room(2)
Room(2)
Novelist
Novelist
Pennyfields
Pennyfields
Mother's death(1)
Mother's death(1)
Mother's death(2)
Mother's death(2)
Mother's death(3)
Mother's death(3)
Night
Night
The Star of the East
The Star of the East
Illusions(1)
Illusions(1)
Illusions(2)
Illusions(2)
Illusions(3)
Illusions(3)

Medium: Moving image, Sound design

The story of the 'parrot'

The Parrot (script）

Roles：

Tai Ling: Middle-aged female owner of grocery shop. Commuting between limehouse and outside world. Picking up goods at the pier. Lives at 98 pennyfields.


[[Act I]] 

Background: In the streets of the casueway, Tai Ling recites the goods in the shop and the nearest cargo ship.

Tai Ling: (talking to herself) The shop is running low on sugar, tea, silk and spices. This time the ship is a few days late. The weather at sea is always so cloudy and unpredictable.


[[Act II]] 

Background: At Tai Ling's house, she talks about a little girl in Chinatown who recently lost her mother at an early age.

Tai Ling: (talking to herself) Oh, poor little Lucy in Pennyfields. She came home the day before yesterday and found it. She's only 15 years old and she's lost her mum... Ugh, how is this poor little girl going to handle her mother's funeral?


[[Act III]]

Background: A conversation between Tai Ling and lucy, who works as a waitress, in a bar. Midway through the conversation, she meets Tai Fu, who has come to the bar for a drink.

Tai Ling: This way! Hey Tai Fu, joining us for a drink tonight? Do you know him? We're folks from the same place, he's a regular at my corner shop, buying sugar and tea. Nice bloke, really. We even played mahjong with your mom yesterday, teaching her how to play. Mahjong, you know (laughs).


[[Act IV]]

Background: coming out of the bar, parting at the door

Tai Ling: (leaving the bar) See you another day, Tai, the cargo ship is arriving, I'll send you the tea you ordered then ah.


[[Act V]]

Background: Woken up in the middle of the night by the noise outside, Tai Ling gets up and goes out to follow the neighbourhood to Tai Fu's house. Conversations with neighbours on the way and the shock of hearing rumours.

Midnight:

Tai Ling: What's that noise? (wakes up from sleep)

 (rustles clothes and goes out) Tai Ling: What's wrong, Zhang? What's happened to the Tai Fu house?!!! 

Tai Ling: (whispers) Drug addiction. How is it possible that a man who is so stingy, who breaks a dollar in half to save for his retirement in his hometown, can be a drug addict? And Lucy...? They... they... they... They.... (hesitant) (shocked) How could they get together? (Angry and disbelieving) What did you say? For a funeral? What funeral? Hey! Say it clearly! (shouting)

(footsteps)

Tai Ling: (hears sirens) Police. The police are coming!!! (PANIC GASPS) (SOUNDS UPSTAIRS) (PUSHES DOOR OPEN WITH A THUD)

(black screen)

Tai Ling: Calling whoever chink it is. (whispers indignantly, unhappy with the name "chink") Why is there no one there. (confused) What the hell is going on. This is ridiculous. (whispers)


（END）


Focus

Statement

Focus aims to reveal the present China’s exam-orient- ed education in the extension of digital technology, repre- sented by emphasizing the students on the desktop for stiffness and meaningless lettering to “deal with” monitoring criteria of exam-oriented education, the project using the photogram to satirize the hollow, the form of mental exercise usually digital education.

Medium: Photography