Liam Young's Planet City Joins SFMOMA's Permanent Collection

SFMOMA has acquired Liam Young's film Planet City for its permanent collection, Young announced in an Instagram post on Oct. 9. The post thanks two SFMOMA curators who proposed the acquisition, along with the National Gallery of Victoria, which commissioned the work. Watch an excerpt below.

The 15-minute film, made in 2020, imagines the world's projected population living in one extremely dense city so that the rest of the planet can return to wilderness. The NGV commissioned it for its 2020 Triennial and credits Alexey Marfin as visual effects supervisor, Matthew Barnes, who records as Forest Swords, for the score, and Stewart Addison for cinematography, along with a team of costume artists. Young's post also credits the studio Well Played VR as VR developers.

According to Young, parts of the Planet City project are also in the collections of MoMA, the NGV, and MAXXI in Rome, and the work continues to tour. A spin-off, The Drone Shepherd: A Planet City Graphic Novel in VR, is listed in the VR gallery of the ArtScience Museum in Singapore.

Young, an Australian film director and speculative architect, showed Planet City in In Other Worlds, a Barbican Centre exhibition that ran through Sept. 6, 2026. Dezeen described it as Young's first major UK solo show; it also premiered a new film, World Machine, about a planetary supercomputer.

For more reading, see The end of the world isn't so bad, SFMOMA and ZKM jointly acquire Eden.Garden 1.0, 25 years after its debut and the Planet City excerpt on Young's Vimeo.