“Effect a Metamorphosis:” A Natural History of Destruction in Liu Yu’s If Narratives Become Great Flood (2020)

In 2020, sonic and visual artist Liu Yu produced a video installation entitled If Narratives Become Great Flood. The installation features a simple, abstract animation of flood, with a cluster of eight animal-like sculptures situated in front of the screen. Consisting of three narrative parts inspired by the myth of the flood in Taiwanese Indigenous folklore, If Narratives is a multisensory installation. It reshapes the ancient, mythical destruction into a living organism of unpredictable force and intensity: the animated great flood constantly collides with the shadows cast by the clay sculptures, while simultaneously resonating with the chanting sounds and nonsensical voiceover by indigenous children. However, in its underlying interaction with a variety of visual, sonic and textual registers, If Narratives is a multivalent artistic mediation on a range of seemingly unrelated aesthetic, post-colonial, and environmental problems.

This paper presents an archaeology of If Narratives, in the form of inquiry into its production process, its cultural-historical referents and its audiovisual metamorphosis. Ultimately, it connects Liu’s form-making in this video installation to the recent studies on plasticity and animation, particularly the works of Catherine Malabou and Cassandra Guan. I argue that Liu’s plastic artistic strategy reconfigures the myth of the flood as a living organism. In doing so, it seeks to reclaim the vitality of nature and its political potency—both of which have long been undermined by modernization. Under this web of media—text, video, and rhythmic poetry—is a field of plasticity that exhibits If Narratives toward a natural history of destruction in Taiwan.