The Way of the Body: Some Thoughts on Liao Wen’s Recent Work
By Manuela Lietti
Fascinated by the way in which 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 necessarily 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 psychology of the people who cross her path—and herself—without
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, theater, 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 and 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 theater. The movable joints typical
of puppets emphasize 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 conceptual 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
visible 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
temporal 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, implying a whole range of feelings, whether pleasant or
not?
Deprived of any unnecessary props or narrative, 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 visualize elusive yet carnal feelings that
require no further explanation.
Liao Wen defines these wall pieces as “contemporary 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
pinching—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 reconnecting to the most intimate self, accepting our
bodily instincts, and defying emotional standardization 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 captures 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 dimensions. Enhancing our own awareness of this
connection is a way to stress our uniqueness, but also to reconcile with and
preserve our own deeper sense of humanity.