Image: Pixy Liao 'It's never been easy to carry you' (Detail) 2013. Digital print, 150 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist
Each, Other
Pixy Liao and Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223)
26 October 2023 – 3 February 2024
Bringing together works in photography by Pixy Liao and Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223) Each, Other articulates the ways that people are fragile, finite. Their bodies, their subjectivities, are composed of pathways that need careful guarding and constant negotiation, just as feelings, memories and emotions pour out from each of us and complicate all kinds of encounters. It is this energetic dualism that defines our cultural, social and economic worlds and that we can reshape by uttering our intentions, asking questions, formulating ideas and committing to lofty abstractions.
By doing this, we might open up nasty wounds behind our hearts, and name the layers of love and loss that animate us, that reveal how our vulnerability is not a weakness but rather a place from which we compose new ways of being in the world and with each other, as friends, family, workmates and lovers … or all at the same time.
We have each other, we take from each other. Love is mutual loss, and so it cannot be separated from work. In addressing love’s relationship to labour – specifically the labour of love – knowing it impossible to untangle love from work, and meaningless to suggest otherwise, this exhibition does not critique such labour as precarious or hidden. Nor does it suggest that work needs to be measured by compensation and utility. Instead, the work of Liao and 223 reflects on how people hold themselves together and support each other as analogous to how nations, territories and regions construct themselves as a whole. And so it follows that there is no inside or outside; the everyday engagements between people, creatures, objects and ideas are co-constitutive. By acknowledging our distinction without treating ourselves as exceptional, can we create new possibilities for understanding and relating to each other?
Each, Other is drawn from the larger exhibition I have not loved (enough or worked), shown at the Art Gallery of Western Australia from November 2022 to April 2023.
Curator: Rachel Ciesla, Lead Creative, Simon Lee Foundation, AGWA
Image Credit: Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223), 腥味储藏 Roe Container (2021), archival pigment print, 125 x 84 cm. Courtesy of the artist
Pixy Liao
Born 1979 Shanghai, China; lives New York, United States of America
Pixy Liao uses photography, video, and installation to question stereotypical representations of couples, artists, and the female experience. Some of these intimate, humorous photographs are from Liao’s Experimental Relationship project, 2007 – ongoing. For Liao:
As a woman brought up in China, I used to think I could only love someone who is older and more mature than me, who can be my protector and mentor. Then I met my current boyfriend, Moro. Since he is 5 years younger than me, I felt that whole concept of relationships changed, all the way around. I became the person who has more authority & power. One of my male friends even questioned how I could choose a boyfriend the way a man would choose a girlfriend. And I thought, ‘Damn right! That’s exactly what I’m doing, & why not?!
In her photographs, Liao often portrays herself in a dominant role while her boyfriend assumes a more submissive position in order to break the predominant relationship model and experiment with new modes of being together.
Lin Zhipeng (aka No. 223)
Born 1979 Guangdong, China; lives Beijing, China
Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223) is a leading figure in contemporary Chinese photography. Selfnamed after the lovelorn Hong Kong police officer in Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 film Chungking Express, 223’s photographs capture the need to love in an otherwise indifferent society. Documenting the ecstasy, eroticism and esotericism of life amidst an often-closed traditional culture, his photographs act as a collective not-so-private diary of a generation pushing against the limits of the rigid social rules of conservative Chinese society. This presentation is comprised of photographs, dating from 2007 which demonstrate the arcs and parameters of his practice. Confidently flash-lit and playfully posed 223’s photographs show you that relationships will continue even as they change. Your friends will grow old, their homes might shift from Beijing to Paris, and some lovers may depart while others choose to stay. In 223’s photographs we see bodies immersed in milky waters or decisively slumped against the wall. These are bodies that are not explicitly working but neither are they at rest. Embodying the messiness of human relationships, his work is equal parts surprising and sanguine, mundane and melancholic, yet always beautiful.
Installation images
