CONSTRUCTING INTIMACY THROUGH MATERIAL AND TIME

Tia Liu is a London-based visual artist working across photography, installation, and moving image. A  graduate of the University of the Arts London in 2024, her practice constructs intimate experience through material, spatial, and temporal strategies. Working through fragments rather than resolved narratives, she focuses on bodies, gestures, and everyday environments in which meaning remains deliberately incomplete. Within this framework, ambiguity remains, and feelings persist. Vulnerability in Liu’s work is not about exposure or weakness. Instead, it is a state that is held, negotiated, and constantly reshaped throughout her evolving practice.

Love - Material and Emotional Construction

Liu’s early installation, Love (2023), establishes the foundation of her practice by constructing controlled material situations. She employs fragile everyday objects such as eggs, candles, and glass to create conditions in which containment is stressed and begins to fail. Two broken eggs rest between overturned glasses, their yolks exposed and tenuously connected by a thin line of red liquid. Rupture, leakage, and dispersal exist together in this arrangement. This instability grows stronger in another piece centred on a white candle, where red wax drips down the surface and accumulates at the base, resembling blood tears.

The work extends beyond installation, transforming into photographs that capture these unstable conditions and preserve moments of change. This transition from material event to image is central to Love and recurs in Liu’s later work. Intimacy is constructed through physical processes and mediation, while vulnerability is expressed through the behaviour of materials.

Love, 2023, archival pigment print

stainless steel mounting, 40 × 40 cm

Love, 2023, archival pigment print

stainless steel mounting, 40 × 40 cm

Duration and Instability of Memory

This material inquiry is extended in Memory Bread (2023), where rupture is replaced by a slower, durational process. She uses bread as both surface and subject, painting personal details such as figures, gestures, and partial scenes on each slice. Small colored pieces, presented as dated units, form a repetitive, archival structure.

The choice of material is key. Bread, being perishable, cannot hold the image it carries. It dries, changes colour, and gradually breaks down, leaving each piece unstable and temporary. While archiving suggests preservation, the bread fights against permanence. Memory Bread (2023) extends a slower condition of erosion, positioning memory as something continuously altered rather than retained.

Memory Bread, 2023, mixed media on bread, 25 × 25 cm

Urban Rhythm and Domestic Tension

A further shift occurs in A Tokyo Toy Story (2024), exhibited in the group exhibition Playground (2024) at Swanfall Art in London. Liu moves from constructed arrangements towards observational image-making. Drawing from the visual language of Japanese toy culture, the work traces how playfulness is embedded within everyday life. Figures are followed through ordinary moments, walking, pausing, and interacting. Bold colours and playful, exaggerated accessories emerge as part of the environment rather than interventions. Instead of material instability, the work operates through disjunctions between figure and context, where elements of play and fantasy appear within everyday urban settings.

A Tokyo Toy Story, 2024, archival pigment print, 60 × 45 cm

A Tokyo Toy Story, 2024, archival pigment print, 40 × 50 cm

A Tokyo Toy Story, 2024, archival pigment print, 60 × 45 cm

This movement towards lived experience is extended in Liu’s video work, A Lover’s Discourse (2024), which examines the dilemma of contemporary romance as both enthralling and devastating. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s book A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, the work adopts a fragmented, reflective structure in which voice-over and images unfold side by side. Set in the enclosed area of a bedroom, the video gathers moments - gestures, sensations, and projections - that feel disjointed, resisting a clear narrative though depicting the instability of modern intimacy in a post-digital world.

In A Lover’s Discourse (2024) Liu maintains a restrained visual language, characterised by close frames, controlled lighting, and a concentration on touch and closeness. This approach stretches her practice beyond material and spatial construction into a temporal negotiation of emotional experience. Emotional conditions like desire, doubt, and longing are revisited rather than resolved, suggesting that intimacy is a condition formed by repetition and absence.

A Lover’s Discourse, 2024, single-channel video with sound, 2 min 35 s

A Lover’s Discourse, 2024, single-channel video with sound, 2 min 35 s

Across a coherent methodology, Tia Liu reconfigured material, image, and time, aligning with her own experiment. From the staged instability of everyday substances to the durational fragility of surfaces, and into constructed and observed environments, her work traces how intimacy can be externalised without becoming fixed. Rather than resolving emotional experience, Liu sustains it - allowing ambiguity to persist and affect to linger within each image. Through restraint, repetition, and controlled tension, vulnerability is not presented as exposure but as a condition held and negotiated, extending across media while maintaining a precise and consistent conceptual framework.

Images: © Tia Liu, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: Biyao (Katie) Yu