Liao Wen, Almost Collapsing Balance, installation view at Capsule Shanghai, 2021
“In these four gallery spaces, whether the works resorts to ritual or embodied experience, they all share an underlying primordial motive, which may be love and hurt in relationships, motherhood, survival instincts or passion.”
- Liao Wen
Rooted in her daily body perception, Liao Wen's artistic practice expands across sculpture, performance and video, and explores variations of emotion within the body through vivid sculptural language. Her experience of making marionettes in her early career inspired a fresh perspective on sculpture. By reproducing body parts and organs, Liao Wen awakens body perception through reconstruction of pain. Her recent work focuses on the theme of “the body in rituals”, externalizing the state of mind and body suspended at a critical point of conflict in a temporarily stable structure.
Liao Wen, Almost Collapsing Balance, installation view at Capsule Shanghai, 2021
The Women's Festival in ancient Greece known as Thesmophoria, the Adonia in Athens, and therapy for hysteria in Victorian England engendered this series of works. Liao Wen’s interest in these stories is partly rooted in the collective revelry of the present - an inescapable experience for the artist in a chaotic sea of information since the outbreak of the pandemic or perhaps an even earlier point in time, the emergence of which she was not necessarily aware of.
Liao Wen, Almost Collapsing Balance, installation view at Capsule Shanghai, 2021
The bodies made of limewood still retain their human joints, which suggest the limit of movement and reveal a tension of stillness. Like revels in the ritual, limitation becomes the focus in this “self-supporting” structure, providing a palpable physical and emotional experience at all times with all efforts and even with gritted teeth.
Liao Wen, Almost Collapsing Balance, installation view at Capsule Shanghai, 2021
Liao Wen (b. 1994, China) currently lives and works in Shenzhen, China. She graduated from the printmaking department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2016, and received a Master's degree in Experimental Art from the Central Academy of Fine Arts China in 2019.
Read more: “Liao Wen's Dislocated Bodies”, Art in America. May 13, 2022