Liu Yujia perused large quantities of text and online materials, collecting many video clips and pictures that support a performative and responsive narrative dimension. The source material for the multi-channel video installation THE BEACH, A FANTASY (2017) comes entirely from (purchased) online archival footage, edited from real archival sources. The clips include familiar scenes of the beach at Normandy, where Allied forces landed during World War II (Atlantic Ocean), waves on Bondi Beach in Sydney (Pacific Ocean), holiday scenes from Miami Beach in the United States (Atlantic Ocean), as well as relatively unfamiliar scenes from Egypt’s Alexandria Port (Mediterranean Sea), the urban beach in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro (Atlantic Ocean), and Martinique, an island in Latin America (Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic). The work was originally inspired by Michael Taussig’s essay “The Beach (A Fantasy).” Liu referenced his selections of beaches near the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea, but Taussig’s narrative is an intentional reversal of American poet Charles Olson’s statement that the history of the world could be summed up by three oceans: the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific (Homer, Dante, and now Melville). Yet how unthinkable Olson’s proposition has become, and he has since consciously resisted or removed ideology, but for Liu Yujia, this historical process does not exist, and ideology is one of her important metrics.

The clips still blend multiple correspondences, including beaches as sites of extreme actions such as battle and surfing, beaches as places of leisure and beaches as garbage dumps, beaches as capitalism and beaches as colonized third world countries, as well as beaches as bodies and beaches as spectacles. Although the artist only selected certain fragments, the content and orientation of every fragment is entirely different, and the video clips she appropriated are products rooted in the perspective of the Other. When the multiple screens are juxtaposed in the same space, she seems to build a special realm that knits together the different cultural, lived, political, and psychological states of gender and class, race and region, trade and conflict, desire and compromise, freedom and terror. As I have noted previously, this is all a metaphor for the beach. Even so, this is a beach about a beach, and at that moment, the visions of the Other are incarnated as participants or consumers, the subjects of the beach.

—Text from< The Allegory of the Beach> by LU Mingjun

多频影像装置《海滩，幻想一种》的视频素材全部购买自网络，都是由真实的档案素材片段剪辑而成。其中有二战联军登陆法国诺曼底的场景（大西洋），悉尼邦迪海滩冲浪的场景（太平洋），美国迈阿密海滩的度假场景（大西洋），也有相对比较陌生的埃及亚历山大港（地中海）、巴西里约热内卢城市海滩（大西洋）、拉丁美洲的马丁尼克岛（大西洋加勒比地区）等海滩场景。这件作品最初是受迈克尔·陶希格（Michael Taussig）的同名文章《海滩（幻想一种）》的启发。艺术家参考了作者关于太平洋、大西洋和地中海等不同海域海滩的选取，不同的是，陶希格的叙述是有意逆着美国诗人奥尔森关于世界历史的次序即地中海、大西洋、太平洋（分别代表荷马、但丁和梅尔维尔）这一趋向的论述展开他辩证的想象的，其间他甚至是有意地在抵抗或去意识形态化的，然而在刘雨佳这里，不仅不存在这一历史的次序，且意识形态恰恰是她重要的参数之一。

多频之间交织着多重对应关系，包括海滩作为战争和冲浪这样的不同极端行为的场所，作为休闲场所的海滩与作为垃圾场的海滩，还有资本主义的海滩与作为第三世界殖民地国家的海滩，以及作为身体的海滩与作为景观的海滩，等等。尽管艺术家所撷取的只是某个片段，每个片段的内容和取向亦完全不同，并且她所挪用的视频素材本身都是基于他者视角的产物，然而，当多屏并置呈现在同一个空间中的时候，仿佛建构了一个交织着性别与阶级、种族与地缘、贸易与冲突、欲望与妥协、自由与恐惧等各种不同文化、生活、政治和心理状态的混合地带。如前面所言，这本身就是海滩的一个隐喻。甚或说，这是一个关于海滩的海滩。而此时，所有他者的目光则已化身为参与者或消费者成了海滩的主体。 

—鲁明军，节选自文章《海滩的寓言》