Curator’s Note

What happens when intimacy becomes performance, not for spectacle, but for study? In Experimental Relationship, Pixy Liao turns the camera inward to test the tensile threads of gender, love, power, and play. With a gaze at once deadpan and tender, her images oscillate between the domestic and the surreal, between vulnerability and domination, between humor and quiet defiance.

Liao’s partner becomes her collaborator, her muse, her mirror. Together, they reimagine the couple not as a fixed archetype but as an evolving hypothesis: two bodies entangled in an ever-shifting experiment in being and becoming. In one image, she feeds him papaya as he lies across a breakfast table; in another, their heads emerge from buttoned shirts like a hybrid organism made of devotion and absurdity. At times, the roles reverse mid-frame. Power seeps and slides. The wires connecting them buzz with a metaphorical charge.

The photographs’ formal clarity, often staged with the sharp light of high noon, or flattened against domestic minimalism, amplifies the artifice of gendered expectations. But Liao never descends into cynicism. Instead, her art proposes: what if the personal is not only political, but also endlessly pliable? What if our bodies were sites not only of memory and projection, but also of invention?

Through choreographed gestures of intimacy, restraint, and subversion, Liao invites us to rewire our understandings of love, not as possession, but as proposition. A question, not an answer. A strange, luminous duet that dares to be its own logic.