For Diane Arbus, it was secretive and perverse. Walker Evans argued that to do it well one has to stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. For the writer Susan Sontag, it was an aggressive tool of power, a predatory act of appropriation. Photography is, by its very nature, an obsessive medium. Even its vernacular echoes something clandestine, almost shameful, akin to espionage: one shoots, frames, captures, exposes; to photograph is to work with triggers, mirrors, hoods, wires, curtains, shutters, darkrooms, and chemical baths. It is an endless list, a relentless index of image-capturing apparatus that also happens to form the machinery that lies at the very heart of our surveillance technology—first as celluloid film; later, as digital video. Art-making is about obsession, too: with a story, an idea, a memory, a place, an object. For Pixy Liao, it is an obsession at once ethereal (love) and tangible (a person), a fixation marked by the slow passage of time, manifested and mechanically reproduced through the cold black box of the camera; more specifically still, as a collection of staged, performative tableaux of her career-defining series Experimental Relationship (2007– ).

Born in Shanghai in 1979, Liao studied foreign languages at university while teaching herself graphic design, then freelanced for three years before growing to despise the work and the clients who never tired of changing her designs and thwarting her artistic ambition. She wanted to be like David Hemmings’s character, a fashion photographer who unwittingly captures a murder, in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow Up (all that free-wheeling glamor and sex and intrigue), and so in the early 2000s she enrolled in a photography MFA at the University of Memphis. It was a strange choice, all things considered: a storied but troubled Southern music town on the western edge of Tennessee. But she was afraid of major cities following the terror attacks of 9/11, and besides, she was obsessed with Elvis Presley and the birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll. There she began to experiment with the commonly accepted modes, types, and genres of the medium, trying to see what fit, what worked, where the vision lay, where the “truth” resided: landscapes, documentary, portraits, interiors, still lives, diaristic snapshots, the vagaries of existence, the flotsam and jetsam of the environment. But it wasn’t until she met Moro, a younger Japanese student and aspiring musician, that she embarked on a radical new direction, a new mode, a new route from which she has rarely strayed, nor disowned, nor disrupted. Gifted a workhorse camera by a professor (a compact Bronica 645, which she still uses), she built a solid framework that suited her practice: minimal equipment, natural light, a handful of exposures per scenario, and, for good measure, “a lot of prayer.”

Liao has since achieved what few photographers do: a recognizable body of work that teases out the power dynamics between artist and muse and the sexual dynamics between men and women, all through fleeting moments in time, mere fractions of a second, somewhere, as TS Eliot once wrote, “at the still point of the turning world.” But her practice is almost exclusively, some might say compulsively, fixated on her and Moro. Her more recent photographs, which seem infused, even haunted, with the claustrophobia brought about by successive lockdowns, have taken a darker turn, especially Intertwined (2023), of her and Moro trapped, or so it appears, in an empty bath, in the near dark, ensnared in the camera’s release cable, their fate sealed by her obsessive lens. And then there are other series, For Your Eyes Only (2012– ) and Men as Bags (2016), for example, minor works that are harder to take as seriously; mischievous and humorous, certainly, but also less revealing, less universally communicative. Even some of the setups from Space Girl Met Earth Boy (2022– ), with their knowing sci-fi, B-movie influences and wider cinematic scope, while still pictorially inventive, lack the emotional resonance or provocation of her earlier works, or the tender, bucolic rapture and quiet majesty of a photograph like Hug by the Pond (2010), one of her most striking and original works. Perhaps we only see what we want to see.

In February we met at Hong Kong’s Blindspot Gallery on the eve of “Comfort Zone,” her first solo exhibition in the city, in which images from Experimental Relationship predominated. Here, face to face (an odd experience with a photographer who appears in almost every frame of their work), we began by winding back the clock to where it all began almost two decades ago, in a small, nondescript rented apartment somewhere in Memphis.

The first photograph of yours that I remember seeing is the one in which you’re wearing a red shirt and dark trousers; Moro has on white underpants and you’re pinching his nipple, looking directly into the lens.

That was the second photo for this project [Relationships work best when each partner knows their proper place (2008)] and a very important image that defined my whole direction. When I saw it, I realized what my relationship with Moro was like in photographic terms. It was suddenly very clear: how the cable looked, the fact that I was pinching him, which is kind of like remote-controlling him. Moro clicking the shutter and looking at me. The way the cable wire comes out of the frame. It’s a perfect photograph in terms of what it taught me.

Once you developed it and scanned it, I imagine you knew immediately that you had something. Has anyone seen the first?

The first was shot on a large-format camera, but because I was still learning about the proportions I lost the focus, so it’s blurry. Let me see if I can find it [starts to scroll through her phone]. It’s a photo of both of us on a bed in Memphis. I’m kind of choking him and kissing him at the same time. Oh, yeah. This one? Okay, so this one I don’t really show it because of the [poor] focus, but that was the start of this feeling of, “Oh, this is fun!” And for the first time I enjoyed the process of a photo shoot because it was also like I was playing with him at the same time.

In terms of influences, some artists reveal them, others don’t. Were there many photographers that you discovered in the MFA program that caught your attention in terms of your own process—whether self-portraiture, staged, performative—or were you already doing your own thing?

Both. There’s one photographer who to this day is still my favorite. It’s the Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus. There’s one image of her lying on a bed called I hate sex (1998). I immediately connected with it as I felt for the first time: I know this photographer.

You said something in your artist’s talk earlier about you and Moro not being the same as how you’re depicted in your photographs. Maybe you’re a little quieter, or shyer, rather than performative. To what degree do you feel that viewers or audiences know you by seeing your work? In many respects people might think they can get close to understanding you through your work, but aren’t your photographs also a veneer, a side of you that’s heightened?

It’s interesting because perhaps the photograph is this one time that is set. So, for Elina [Brotherus] it’s the same thing. She regards the final result as a photograph and not herself. For me too. The photograph is not me in my daily life. But at the same time, I feel that it is also me because I try to put my real self into the images. I really try and expose my mind.

There are also early images by Jeff Wall, such as Picture for Women (1979), that made me think of your work.

The one with the woman standing in front of a mirror, and he’s behind taking the picture? Yeah, I really like that one. That was a special photo for me.

And then there's the one where he’s doubled, standing in an apartment (Double Self-Portrait, 1979); and also the nude man lying on a sofa with headphones on (Stereo, 1980).

I remember seeing Double Self-Portrait when I was studying photography. I think that was the moment that I started to think about what kind of photos really speak to me.

In reference to your work people often talk about the “subversion of the male gaze.” Did you go into this project thinking that this was something you wanted to tackle or explore, or was it placed on your work by critics and curators after the fact?

For me photography was more like self-exploration, because before I came to United States, or before doing this project, I didn’t know myself well. I knew that I was frustrated with my life, as a woman, but at the same time I didn’t know what to do. Through this project I realized that there was a chance that I could grow into the type of woman I wanted to be. At the very beginning I didn’t really think about subverting the male gaze. Naturally, being female, it has become about the female gaze. In the beginning people didn’t think that I treated Moro very nicely in my other photographs. I really wanted to explain that it’s okay between us. This is how our relationship is, and we feel comfortable in it.

What do you think about the idea that people will talk about your work in a way that was never your intention? It’s just the way one makes art and it’s not necessary for you to explain, as the artist. The work is the explanation, but there’s always going to be others that come from outside and express what they think they read 
into it.

That’s interesting. For any artist, it is very hard. If you’re strategic then maybe you can make work starting with a goal. But I think a lot of artists make work without knowing why. And by making work you start to understand yourself, your thoughts, the reasons behind it. And then, in a very general way, people might say what it’s about, but that’s not what you were thinking. But maybe in a way, it’s also right.

Throughout your work there seems to be this great symbiosis between you and Moro. You almost become one, this union of man and woman. It reminds me of this beautiful passage from Letters to a Young Poet (1929) by Rainer Maria Rilke, in which he writes: “Perhaps the sexes are more closely related than we think. And the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in man and woman, freed of all sense of error and disappointment, seeking one another out not as opposites, but as brothers and sisters and neighbors. And they will join together as human beings to share the heavy weight of sexuality that is laid upon them with simplicity, gravity, and patience.”

Thank you. I think that’s amazing. This was a man from 100 years ago with such an advanced understanding about relationships.

Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1923) are also inspired by Auguste Rodin’s sculptures, which forms another interesting connection to your work. But going back to this union of man and woman . . .

I’ve always longed for this in a relationship, this hope that two people can be so close that they become one unit. Because I feel like one person is limited. By combining two you’re much more powerful and can do so many more things. And that was always my goal in a heterosexual relationship, which was very hard to achieve, until now.

Throughout your work there’s also this notion of the act of looking. Every frame is different. Often your gaze meets ours, sometimes not. Sometimes Moro’s does. And I get the sense that where or who is looking at any one time speaks to a certain power dynamic. But at the same time there’s the wire coming out of the frame toward us, the viewer, almost as if we are behind the camera. This implicates us. Your work draws people in that way.

I think it’s important that these photographs are understood as a performance for the camera, and that eventually they will be seen. I want to communicate with others, and I think whoever’s looking at the camera is trying to communicate with the audience to 
think as that person: either you’re the dominant one or the one being dominated.

Speaking of domination, some of your work is very sexual in nature, but at the same time it’s clinical, clean. It’s rigid, and it’s deliberate in terms of its composition and choreography. You find interesting ways to show those sides of a relationship without going down the obvious route when it comes to documenting intimacy.

Sexuality is a very important part of any relationship. My work is very much about desire, especially female desire. But at the same time, I feel that being human, we sometimes lose our minds when we look at pornography. So, there’s always this fine line that I’m asking myself: is this photo too much? Did I cross the line? I don’t want to cross that line, because I don’t want to take people’s mind off the subject. That’s partly why you don’t see full nudity or more intense interactions.

There’s this quote that I like from the great Japanese photographer Ken Domon about the purity of the absolutely unstaged snapshot. For him, it’s this that constitutes “real” photography, not the staged or performative.

In a way, he’s right. I don’t think I’m a real photographer. I appreciate that type of unstaged photography because I feel like it’s so real. But at the same time, it requires a certain amount of talent, which I don’t have. I simply can’t do it. My reaction time is too long. I can never capture any moment.

Do you really think that’s true? Don’t you think it’s simply down to luck, of being in the right place at the right time?

It’s an instinct, how fast one’s movement is linked to one’s eyes and one’s brain. And I think my link is kind of broken. I could never do that even if I wanted to. I want to, but I can’t.

So for those photographers more inclined toward staged portraiture, performance, or conceptual work, compared to say [Henri] Cartier-Bresson or [Daido] Moriyama, there’s an innate talent on one side, but on the other it has to be manufactured and thought through, that that sort of immediacy is simply a natural talent one either has or not?

I think at the very least that requirement exists. But at the same time, it’s not about the real world. The reason I make photographs is because the real world doesn’t satisfy me. I don’t see the things that I imagine. And I want to see them in an image form so they can help me to think more concretely about what a photograph is.

Over the past two centuries, photographers have had opposing views on what the medium is, or what it means. Nobuyoshi Araki once remarked that rather than exposing the subject in one’s work you are, in fact, always exposing yourself.

Yes, he’s right.

Even in your images of Moro, it’s your observation of him, which is an exposure of your relationship to him. So, you, the photographer, are always present. And that’s often true in whatever one shoots. In this sense, Araki believes that as a photographer, exposing oneself is frightening.

I’m exposing both of us.

You’ve spoken about this fear in a relationship of things going wrong, especially as one whose parents divorced, which I can relate to.

I worry about it, but the longer we stay together the more relaxed I am.

Perhaps your work is a way of keeping him close.

It is. Rather than focus on being a photographer or an artist, my goal is to keep him close. Because I think I’m the type of person who puts most of my thoughts into relationships, especially intimate relationships, because I want to have a lasting, sustaining, ongoing relationship, if I can. It’s like creating a comfort zone.

It’s almost like you’re putting the relationship into a box—that box being the camera.

Yes, it’s our own world.