Hu Liwei works with moving images. She comes from Chongqing, China where she is surrounded by fog all year (which makes her have fantasies of tropical islands, sunshine, beaches, breezes, ice cream, and coconuts). Her stage name is Young Coconut, but she does not know how to rap, and is therefore Young CocoNot. As a practicing “coconut” from Chongqing, Liwei does not eat chili pepper.
She makes films, video installations, sound works, and community-engaging pieces that explore the individual and collective memory of "home, hometown, and homeland" in diaspora. Grounded in specific sites and spaces, she searches for the concept of ‘home’ in family histories, food memories, and dialects, crossing different temporalities and geographies.
Liwei's recent experimental film short, zhú mù nòng/The Riverside will be presented in the program New Harvest II at the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam during Amsterdam Art Week 2023.
While at MacDowell, Liwei researched how her new project "Moon Vessel" unveils different histories from the time when Chongqinq was the temporary capital of the Republic of China via a combination of documentary and animated film. During residency, she completed this research of documentary footage and has and created the storyboard for the animation portion of the project.
