Fascinated by how the surface of the body becomes a vehicle for intimacy, contemporary Chinese artist Liao Wen (b. 1994 in Chengdu, China; currently lives and works in Hong Kong) considers the body a liminal milieu, the beginning and result of the struggles that define our identities as private and public individuals. Her work puts forth dichotomies, without nec- essarily reconciling them or erasing the colliding forces they involve. The rational and irrational, the microscopic and macroscopic, the individual and collective spheres intersect in works that speak of desire, perception, pain, transience, and loss and encapsulate the most human of all emotions.
Genuinely intrigued by the slightest details of other people’s bodies and gestures, Liao Wen stores these attributes in her memory and tries to decipher the psy- chology of the people who cross her path—and herself—with- out any aesthetic judgement. She relies on this wide array of visual inputs that unconsciously re-appear in her work to transform sights into insights charged with personal and social nuances, delving into the fields of history, sociology, and philosophy, but also dance, theatre, and literature.
After receiving her undergraduate degree in printmaking from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (2016) and her master’s degree in experimental art from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (2019), Liao Wen shifted her focus to sculpture and began to portray the body using the articulated parts of puppetry. A puppet workshop she attended in 2017 in Prague marked her first encounter with sculpture, particularly wood sculpture—still her preferred medium—and helped her to become more than a student. In subsequent years, she would define herself as a puppeteer. Her graduation work Her Room in the Dream (2018–19) involved a marionette version of Liao in a room filled with personal items and a performance as the puppet master before she cut the puppet’s strings.
But it was not until 2020 that the series Almost Collapsing Balance brought her fully into her identity as an artist, acknowledged in her 2021 solo show at Capsule Shanghai bearing the same title.
A feeling of precarious balance is the leitmotif of this series, anchored in Liao’s interest in marionette theatre. The movable joints typical of puppets emphasise the vivid tension between the physical body and the mind that results when someone is pushed to their physical and mental limits. Hesitation (2020), a highly personal piece about desire and loss, captures this contradiction through the con- ceptual and spatial dynamics it activates and the continuous redefinition of the work’s central axis. An ‘alien’ naked body of lime wood does something like a backbend, teetering precariously on four spindly limbs. A hook-like appendage vis- ible from underneath seems to guard or menace a silicone droplet filled with air. Is it a precious package to be escorted to a destination or an unnatural growth to be removed? In Liao’s rendering of corporality, the flesh is alive—a repository of experiences, not a mere vessel—which inspired her to hand-paint the pieces in a muted palette based on human skin.
Liao uses the rational to portray the irrational, involving a long and multi-layered process of thinking, researching, sketching, calculating, and prototyping in which she moves along the thin line between control and randomness and during which her body becomes a tool, too. She polishes the wood herself, sometimes so absorbed by the process that she loses the sensation in her fingers. This feeling of tempo- ral numbness led Liao to her new series Sensation, which debuted in early 2023 in the group show Bodies and Souls at Cassina Projects in Milan.
Why do we tend to be aware of our body only when it doesn’t function properly, when it becomes the site of a deficit, when it loses its integrity? What if we started to pay attention to the subtle, physiological, and uncontrollable messages our body shares with us and celebrate its vitality, im- plying a whole range of feelings, whether pleasant or not?
Deprived of any unnecessary props or narra- tive, Sensation plays with the purity of volumes, shapes, and lines; it uses an essential sculptural language to speak of the body as a ‘sensory machine,’ uniting the highly abstract yet physical realms. Materials include lime wood, crystals, feathers, stainless steel, and jesmonite distilled to embrace subtraction rather than accumulation. At the beginning of her career, Liao would think of incorporating latex and fabric; now there is no room for visual gimmicks. These metonymies activate synesthetic experiences and visualise elusive yet carnal feelings that require no further explanation.
Liao Wen defines these wall pieces as “con- temporary ex voto,” votives that recognize and pay homage to the sensations that make us alive and alert. In Greece, votives were anatomical offerings that represented the exterior body, while in the Etruscan and Roman contexts, interior body parts were also added and dedicated. They embodied the dedicant’s prayer for the health of the body part portrayed.
Liao translates the ideas of squeezing, pressing, and pinch- ing—metaphors for what happens within the body—into gestures used to sculpt the lime wood. She does not offer these pieces to any god; they are fragments that remind us that only by re- connecting to the most intimate self, accepting our bodily instincts, and defying emotional standardisation can we go back to feeling, and perhaps being whole again. Itch (2022), inspired by the uncontrollable urge to sneeze, manifests as a feather tickling a crystal; the nervous anxiety felt in the pit of one’s stomach is rendered in Squeeze (2022) through the juxtaposition of warm lime wood and a cold, metallic ‘pin’. Inhaling (2023) envisions the often-overlooked action of breathing through light blue resin elements set into a fluid rendering of the main organ involved. Swallow (2023) and its lemon-yellow resin element capture the motion of swallowing out of thirst. While Throw Up (2023) focuses on the futility of suppressing the natural urge to vomit, Call of a Nature (2023) does the same for the need to excrete urine.
Elegant, ambiguous, ironic, and rooted in archaic wisdom, these pieces are an ode to reactions and functions usually neglected. In Liao’s eyes, the body is a tunnel linking spirit and matter, the personal and cosmological di- mensions. Enhancing our awareness of this connection is a way to stress our uniqueness, but also to reconcile with and preserve our own deeper sense of humanity.
Text by Manuela Lietti
