The year 2020 asked us to be careful, to inform, to protect and to isolate ourselves.
We respected the rules, stopped all projects, watched the world change and waited. Often, however, we just wanted to escape, to run far away and return to normality.
ESCAPE, the latest work by Simo Liu, a Chinese illustrator, animator and designer now based in Los Angeles, reflects on these thoughts and reasoning.

ESCAPE is an artistic project that meditates on the past year, it is a work that speaks of struggles, disasters and fears, it is a journey in search of hope and solution.

Simo Liu has designed 9 different rooms, conceptually connected to each other, and has created a project in continuous, perennial communication.
Inspired by Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Maurits Cornelis Escher’s impossible works, the artist has constructed a maxi illustration that can be divided into 9 different rooms.
Each room is a window on a relevant event of the year: Covid-19, locusts plague, territorial isolation, forest fires in Australia, social distancing, transport blockades, floods and earthquakes.
These rooms link to each other, are in constant communication and can ideally be considered the most impactful milestones of 2020. 

The last stage, the ninth image, what Simo Liu calls Utopia, is an indefinable and impromptu environment. Utopia is the solution to the first 8 problems, it is the place where we would all like to be and represents hope and a return to normality.

ESCAPE captures a year full of challenges and documents the problems that should never happen again. Simo Liu tries to make the viewer reflect on the fact that, if most of the time we feel trapped and try to escape, perhaps it is because we need to rethink our relationship with our surroundings.
The artist reflects on the relationship that exists between man and nature and urges everyone to meditate on this. We need to rebalance the ecosystem and protect our home, Planet Earth.

Watch the project here, follow Simo Liu on her officialwebsite and find out more about ESCAPE here.

Articolo di Federica Cimorelli