Scenes from the city

While visitors might not be able to sit through all 14 films at the show, they will be able to dip into any of the works and get a flavor of the cities or people in focus and gain a fresh perspective.

Morris' paintings follow a similar concept. In this show, she and her team have painted an on-site wall painting that measures 58 meters long, covering one entire wall of the exhibition hall.

For Morris, her films and paintings are "two sides of the same coin". The former is fast and dynamic, while the latter is slow and static. The artist also has two sides to her personality. On the one hand, she is impatient and is always thinking about her next project. On the other, she uses paintings to force herself to slow down and concentrate, read books and meditate.

Since 1998, when she produced her first film Midtown about New York, Morris has devoted herself to portraying either individuals or cities. And the cities she has chosen as subjects, such as Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, Paris and Beijing, are all aligned with each other in terms of their economy or culture. But Morris says her films are not documentaries, because her works are more surreal, sometimes like a dream, sometimes like a nightmare.

"It's an investigation with no ending, no answer and even no truth－only perspectives open for interpretation," she says.

Having filmed in many of the world's major cities, the artist says she finds the future of urban living a little worrying, especially the increasing power of surveillance used by tech companies.

"It's a contradiction. I use all these products and then worry about my privacy," she says, adding that it's also the contradictions in cities that are the focus of her films.