Hooligan interrogates the constructed nature of identity and language through the motif of ‘mien shiang’, a Chinese medicinal practice that interprets a person's future based on their facial features. ‘Liumang’ is one of many words used to signify an identity marked by cruelty and immorality, and in Hooligan it is this word that obscures the facial features of the subject.

 Originating from the individual characters for ‘listless’ and ‘vagrant’, the markings bear a resemblance to the facial tattoos commonly associated with criminal activity in China, and function to evoke a sense of emancipated identity, imprisonment, and social stratification. This motif takes place within a television set, which oscillates between archive images of propaganda and newspaper extracts aimed to control and extinguish those labelled as socially or politically deviant, emulating the relationship between public perceptions of reality and the televisual images of China’s past. In this entropy of truth, communication and identity, the television dissolves into static, erasing the past in a final and inevitable act of revolt for the future.