Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones

Zhiyue Liu – Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones

Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones originates from a concealed childhood bodily experience and unfolding into an exploration of desire, sexuality, and fantasy shaped by migration. Borrowing from a Chinese metaphor for navigating uncertainty through instinct and touch, the project reflects a state of curiosity, confusion, and searching. Through staged photographs, the artist invites female friends to perform ordinary gestures of daily life: domestic, bodily, and playful actions moving between care, routine, intimacy, and the rituals through which a home is inhabited. Drawing on fantasies and desires repressed within the Chinese cultural context, the images complicate conventional ways of looking at the female body, inhabiting sapphic eroticism, exposure, curiosity, and strangeness.

Diploma project (2026)

Students
Zhiyue Liu
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