Current main project · In development
Ghosts of Our Mothers
A collaboration with Lizzy Tan exploring how humans and AI interpret care and motherhood in cinema. These different readings become choreography, asking what machines recognise, miss or transform.
Watch the project introduction ↗Current main project · In development
Ghosts of Our Mothers
A collaboration with Lizzy Tan exploring how humans and AI interpret care and motherhood in cinema.
These different readings become choreography, asking what machines recognise, miss or transform.
Project introduction · 1 min 14 sec · English subtitles
A Murdersome Night's Dream
A Chinese woman wakes in a São Paulo flatshare beside a body she won’t let herself look at, and spends one dream-long morning choosing not to know who killed her flatmate, or whether it was her.
Hungover, a Chinese woman wakes in a São Paulo flatshare beside a corpse under the bed she refuses to look at. She flees with her flatmate Angelica, a neighbour in pursuit, into a Chinese supermarket drowning in red. Each time she tries to remember the night it tells a different story and puts the knife in a different hand: the landlord, the girl who passed her the pills, and finally a wrist tied with her own red string.
Three versions of the murder, three suspects, and one she keeps refusing to see. A thriller shot entirely from inside her eyes.
The K-Pop Group
At a care home, a ninety-year-old woman leads the dance group. Each time a dancer dies, the troupe marks the spot on the floor and clears it for the next person. A comedy about death.
Only Human
A five-minute first-person short about AI companionship: the guilt, loneliness and paranoia of depression, and codependency with the person you rely on.
A mysterious scientist tells Eli that his wife, Mara, is an AI he built with his own hands, and that Eli is the last human on Earth. Eli combs their life together for proof that Mara is a machine, and finds it in the fact that she never refuses him and never leaves. To give her back her freedom he sets out to delete her by forgetting. Midway, he discovers that it is he who is being erased.
The truth is that Eli has lived for years with severe depression, and Mara has cared for him all along.
High Society
A broke PhD student blags her way through London Fashion Week on her ex-paparazzo cousin’s tricks, to steal one impossible photograph.
Mid-PhD and “essentially unemployed,” she takes a job helping her cousin Carrie, a magazine editor and ex-paparazzo, covering London Fashion Week: front rows, backstage, tea with famous faces who can never remember her name. With no invites and no access, glamour turns to hustle.
Shot entirely from inside her eyes (she is the camera, never seen), the film flips between Wes Anderson’s polished surface and Guy Ritchie’s grainy hustle. The flip is the joke.
Museum Works
MongolChina
Digital museum & history archive · China & the Mongol world, 1100–1300
A digital museum and history archive exploring China and the Mongol world through objects, homes, cities and everyday life.
Museum collections, historical accounts and scholarship come together to trace encounters across 1100–1300, connecting material culture with the societies that shaped it.
Museum films · images and videos AI-generated
The Art World in One Lap
GEN4 One Lap · 2026 · 60 sec · 4K upscaled
A Formula E GEN4 car leaves BFI IMAX for a lap through art: Hokusai's Great Wave, Thomas Moran's Green River cliffs, Summer Mountains attributed to Qu Ding, and the Cosmic Cliffs photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope. Painted worlds become living landscapes as the ride accelerates towards a return to the cinema, suspended in space.
AI-generated imagery and video, with music created using Google Lyria.
Only the Faces Have Changed 只是朱顏改
After Zhou Wenju, In the Palace · Song dynasty copy · The Met, Open Access · 21 sec
Zhou Wenju painted the women of Li Yu's palace. From captivity the fallen emperor wrote: the carved railings and jade steps must still be there, only the faces have changed. The women walk out of the silk one by one, a guqin note falling for each, until only the weave, the stains and the collectors' seals remain.
The closing couplet is not a font. Every character is collected from brush originals, nine from the Wang Xizhi stele collections, the rest from Zhao Mengfu and Wen Zhengming.
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Owned 照夜白
After Han Gan, Night-Shining White · The Met, Open Access · 23 sec
Night-Shining White, the favourite steed of Emperor Xuanzong, strains at his post. Time runs forward and the collectors' marks arrive dynasty by dynasty, seal after seal crowding the paper red. The horse never gets loose. The last mark is the museum.
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A Moment in Tea 松下茶
Tea Bowl with Hare's-Fur Glaze · Southern Song · The Met 91.1.226, Open Access · 48 sec
Steam rises off an eight-hundred-year-old tea bowl. A wrist whisks the froth into mountains and rivers, two figures clash somewhere in the mist, and one sip drains it all away. The bowl goes cold and alone in a museum, having outlived everyone who ever drank from it.
Only the bowl is real, the Met's Hare's-Fur tea bowl composited into every close shot so the object never becomes a copy. The calligraphy is not a font: every character is cut one glyph at a time from Su Shi's own brush in his Former Ode on the Red Cliff (前赤壁赋), set as bilingual subtitles, one line per shot. Scored for solo guqin.
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Writing
Oni On's diary entries and creative works are followed by over 8,000 readers on Douban, and have been exhibited at Moon Gallery in Tokyo and in London (Welcome Aboard, Untitled Kitchen).
She has facilitated writing workshops across Berlin, Chiang Mai, London, and Wenzhou.
Her interactive piece Mirror Flower, Water Moon runs in eight chapters: love and loss, submerged. Enter ↗
About / Contact
Lois Liao (Oni On) is a sociologist (PhD in Housing Studies), writer, and city walk guide. She is the Festival Director for EAST2046 CIC.
Work enquiries: loisyixi@gmail.com