Hantao Li is a visual artist, architectural designer, researcher, and filmmaker based in London. He intertwines real footage with computer-generated imagery to critically explore and situate today’s society and technology. Through radical and speculative fictions, Hantao envisions and interrogates the environments and landscapes that shape the human condition. His primary tools include narrative films co-produced with real-time game engines, actual footage, and scientific foundations, all aimed at immersing audiences in these speculative worlds.
Influenced by video games, architectural visualization, and simulations, he utilizes CGI environments to symbolize structures of power. This approach allows him to craft surreal sequences that unveil hidden realities and probe into potential futures.
His work has been exhibited and screened at Arnolfini, Simultan Festival, Beijing International Short Film Festival, UCCA, House of European Institutes, and Derby QUAD.
@hantaoli98
hantao.li98@gmail.com
Single-channel video, 13 min, 2026
The offshore oil industry is in steep decline, leaving behind colossal steel monuments to global warming. In Cromarty Firth—Scotland’s unofficial "oil rig graveyard"—dozens of decommissioned rigs sit idle, usually destined to be shipped thousands of miles away to distant ship-breaking yards where their environmental legacy can be conveniently forgotten.
In the film, a journalist returns to his hometown of Cromarty to bear witness to the decommissioning of a North Sea oil rig on which his father once worked. Instead of a quiet, outsourced destruction, he finds a domestic disassembly reimagined into a staged performance—a civic ceremony of accountability, transformation, and cultural reflection.
At times as absurd as it is strikingly plausible, the film plays with notions of truth and reality as the rig is slowly dismantled into a series of distributed, anti-monumental objects. Giants' Anatomy is a speculative journey through a liminal landscape that challenges audiences to consider our fossil-fuel legacy, asking: when colossal infrastructure loses its function, does it still hold meaning—or only mass?
Credits:
Written, Directed, and Edited by: Hantao Li
Supervising Producer: Mike Jones, FVU
Executive Producers: Susanna Chisholm, FVU, Angelica Sule, FVU
Sound Composition: Juice Shuting Cui
Sound Design: Juice Shuting Cui, Hantao Li
Sound Mix: Juice Shuting Cui, Antosh Wojcik
Mastering: Antosh Wojcik
Cinematography: Hantao Li, Zhifei Liang
3D Visual & VFX: Hantao Li
Project Advisor: Inigo Minns, Pol Esteve Castelló
FVU New Takes Mentor: David Blandy
Cast:
Narrator: Stuart Croxford
Special Thanks:
AA Diploma 12, Sebastian Tiew, Alexander Krolak, Architectural Association, Invergordon Museum
Supported by:
Giants’ Anatomy, Dark Studio, Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol, UK, 28 Feb - 31 Mar 2026