Instagram @lianjinyong
Jinyong Lian
CHINA
Lian’s work explores the psychological instability that emerge from personal realms and fictional worlds, using evocative imagery to examine their uncertainties. Her approach involves constructing scenes and gestures, using the body to create performative interactions or tableaus that she describes as “independent fables.” Each image functions as a metaphor for exploring the pressure and tensions that emerge in relationships.
Lian’s work is also deeply influenced by the fair tale The Emperor’s New Clothes. In the story, it is a child who dares to point out the emperor’s nakedness:
“I see myself as that child—using my creative process as a declaration, calmly and humorously exposing the absurdities of contemporary life. Through playful yet metaphorical scenes, I strive to explore the psychological tension individuals experience when confronted by conflict or absurd situations. This exploration arises from my constant sense that our daily lives are permeated by invisible oppression and undefined dangers–often manifesting in interpersonal relationships and the tensions between individuals and societal structures. This sensation resonates closely with Freud’s concept of the ‘uncanny,’ a subtle and elusive unease that lingers beneath the surface of everyday life.”
In collaboration with Fisheye Gallery
• SERIES •
Trust Me
For Nyo Jinyong Lian, everything begins with a fault line: between reality and fiction, gentleness and tension, closeness and strangeness. Her images do not describe the world; they question it. Her photographic language, built on lucid and unsettling stagings, reveals the subtle shift between trust and suspicion.
Born from a constant feeling of displacement—geographical, cultural, intimate—her work turns non-belonging into its emotional and formal engine. Chiselled light, suspended bodies, frozen gazes: her compositions express latent alienation, an absent presence. Intimacy becomes a stage for fiction, where tenderness sometimes conceals relations of power.
Through black humour and the absurd, she deconstructs daily gestures and dominant narratives, inventing a feminine and queer subjectivity that is both ambivalent and assertive. Her works do not affirm but undo, transforming the image into a laboratory of doubt. Within this instability, she opens a space of vertigo, where the individual can reinvent ties to the world.
