Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony II, 2023, by Liu Chuang is a three-channel video work that layers together a vast and discursive network of speculative research. The film proposes a counter-narrative to the endgames of industrialisation and technological progress by exploring the confluences of sonic and cold war histories, metallurgy and evolutionary theory, and science-fiction and religion. The artist points to the Earth’s enduring legacies of plurality and polyphonic singing to suggest how collectivity might provide an antidote to cycles of technological lock-ins.
The film follows two seemingly divergent threads: lithium extraction and the cultivation of silence. Early on, the artist borrows sci-fi writer Liu Cixin’s Sophon, an alien supercomputer from the trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past (2008–10). Sent to Earth to halt human technological advancement, Sophon observes that Earth is already trapped in other forms of stasis. Inertia, in one form, lies in the technology lock-ins which perpetuate Earth’s carbon and lithium-dependent infrastructures.
The artist’s camera meditates over the lurid green expanse of the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat and greatest source of lithium. Lithium is currently used in the production of rechargeable batteries, considered crucial to the development of renewable energies. Liu compares the current lithium industry to the 15th Century Spanish silver trade, where silver ore was excavated from the Potosí mines in present-day Bolivia, only 50 km away yet 500 years in the past. Lithium now traces the same path as the Manila Galleon Trade Route, a passage used to connect the Andes to Europe via Mexico and the Philippines. Liu insinuates that industrialisation repeats events of the past, in what Brian Arthur terms path dependence. Liu’s work proposes that we are witnessing yet another cycle of struggle over natural resources, now powered by corporations rather than empires, yet wielding the same tools of extraction and exploitation.
Silence, Liu suggests, is also a form of technological inertia. In the opening sequence of the film, a bone spins through the sky, a clear reference to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and an allegory of technological advancement through violence. In Liu’s film, the bone is not just a weapon but a flute, proposing how song and technology are closely entwined.
The film turns to the mysterious expression of polyphonic singing. Liu’s work draws from evolutionary musicologist Joseph Jordania’s hypothesis that music did not evolve from monophony to complexity, but from polyphony to singularity. Choral singing began in the trees, before descending into literal and metaphorical darkness. Silence rules the land. So why do humans sing?
The sonic terrain of the film was composed prior to the imagery and Liu uses this to suggest the diminishing of Earth’s plurality through industrialisation and technocultural dominance. The film is narrated by Sophon in the waning Muya language of southwest Sichuan, of which less than 15,000 speakers remain. Samples of birdsong, bats and gibbons are heard amongst the polyphonic singing of Lithuanian verse, Mbuti tribeswomen, and the Yao, occupying the highlands of the China-Vietnam border. This multiplicity is reiterated through visual materials spanning multiple generations and continents. Archival photographs intersect with drone footage and Hu Huai’s tenth-century painting Bestiary of Real and Imaginary Animals is animated to show the disappearance of various species. These voices, once abundant on earth are now becoming inaudible as new technologies prevail.
At the heart of the film is a challenge to a dominant evolutionary narrative, which privileges competition over cooperation. Liu asks how we might attune our senses to the memory of Earth’s polyphonic past, one which aligns with indigenous and feminist understandings of the world. One such example is Becoming Undone, where the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz challenges characterisations of Charles Darwin’s work as genetic determinism, showing how his writing complicates theories of natural selection through expressions of desire and will. Similarly, through Sophon’s gaze, Liu reminds us that mutualism, interdependence and symbiosis can act as equal forces of change.
About the artist
Liu Chuang works primarily with film, sculpture, readymade, and installation. His works often integrate long-term history and an ecological imaginative arc in order to trace the social, cultural, and economic transformations of contemporary China. Weaving narratives that connect the micro and macro, past and present, fiction and reality, Liu Chuang explores how vast and complex changes in nature, tradition, demographics, cutting-edge technology, and socio-economic systems affect individuals and their engagements with the world. His work has shown recently at Sharjah Biennale 16, to carry (2025); the 4th Xinjiang China International Art Biennial, Pulse of the Hinterland (2024); Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024, After Rain (2024); the 58th Luleå Biennial, Craft and Art (2022); the 2nd Thailand Biennial, Butterflies Frolicking on the Mud: Engendering Sensible Capital (2021); the 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, One Escape At A Time (2021); the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water (2021); the 3rd Guangzhou Image Triennale 2021, Intermingling Flux (2021); and Kathmandu Triennale 2077: Garden of Six Seasons (2021).