Zhiyue Liu — People — Network — School — ECAL

Zhiyue
Liu

Projects

Zhiyue Liu – Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones

PHOTOGRAPHY

Zhiyue Liu – Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones

by Zhiyue Liu

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 complicated conventional ways of looking at the female body, inhabiting sapphic eroticism, exposure, curiosity, and strangeness.

Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2025 - MAP2

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Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2025 - MAP2

with Elisa Medde

This module assists the students to develop into a finalized work a project that further expands their interests and research. The module gives the opportunity to take some of the ideas, skills and themes explores in the first semester and make into a brand new work that can take any possible form: a book, an installation, an online project, a performance.

Soft Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP2

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Soft Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP2

with Marco De Mutiis

The course, tutored by Marco De Mutiis, explored how emotions are being exploited and transformed by social media practices and aesthetics (e.g. influencer photography and CGI, operational beauty and weaponized cuteness), as well as through recent image technologies (e.g. generative AI platforms and text-to-image services).

Materialized Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP2

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Materialized Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP2

with Mazaccio & Drowilal

The purpose of this class is to examine the relationships between photography — in a context shaped by the digital — and its various modes of display. Students will have to consider what a photograph may be materially and explore how an image’s meaning is derived from both the mode of its distribution and the material form that it assumes. Although the final outcome has to include photography in a third dimensional way ( installation ), projects may use and combine image-based practices such as digital photography, collage, CGI, projection, printmaking, sculpture, objects, or performance, to encourage an expanded approach to photographic practice. The idea is to challenge the different types of engagement possible with pictures today.

Workshop - Simone C Niquille - 2025

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Workshop - Simone C Niquille - 2025

with Simone Niquille, Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet

For this workshop, ECAL invited Simone C Niquille, Swiss designer and researcher based in Amsterdam whose practice investigates how digital images, computer vision, and 3D technologies shape the way bodies and objects are represented in contemporary visual culture. Through her research platform Technoflesh, Niquille examines the infrastructures behind digital imagery (from stock images and 3D assets to machine vision systems) and the cultural assumptions embedded in them. Her work reveals how datasets, rendering software, and visual standards influence how bodies, materials, and environments are modeled and understood.

ECAL x PAPERBOY

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ECAL x PAPERBOY

with Charles Negre, Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet, Tanguy Morvan

Paperboy ECAL is the result of a close collaboration between Paperboy Magazine and first-year students of the Master Photography program. Under the guidance of photographer Charles Negre , they explored the potential of everyday objects to create mysterious and playful still lives.

Contemporary Photography - Spring 2025 - MAP1

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Contemporary Photography - Spring 2025 - MAP1

with Kim Knoppers

Do Not Disturb – Curating in Progress The course Do Not Disturb – Curating in Progress is designed to give students a sneak peek into the craft of curating an exhibition from the perspective of an independent curator (formerly at Foam, Amsterdam 2011-2021). The course teaches to engage with the historical, theoretical, and practical matters of curating a photography exhibition, with issues regarding the desperate desire of mankind to display objects, the photography exhibition in the digital age, the blending of photography with other disciplines in a physical space, Imaging the Anthropocene and Photography in Times of Radical Change. Students were invited to create a group exhibition with a physical model and an online solo exhibition with their own work.

Self-Initiated Project - Spring 2025 - MAP1

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Self-Initiated Project - Spring 2025 - MAP1

with Bruno Ceschel

The course is a platform for the development of personal projects that arise from the desire and curiosity of each student. The basic concept of the work must be relevant to the field of contemporary photographic images. Each project can take a different form depending on the specificities, contents and inclinations of each participant. From books to multimedia installations, from performance to CGI, group discussions will articulate a plural vision of photography’s applications today.

Applied Photography - Spring 2025 - MAP1

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Applied Photography - Spring 2025 - MAP1

with Charlie Engman

This course explores contradiction, ambiguity, and authorship in photographic meaning and the role of aesthetics in shaping an image’s function across contexts. Photography operates in a complex space where visual style, context, and audience expectations interact to produce meaning. This course asks students to examine how photographic aesthetics influence interpretation and how an image’s function shifts when adapted for different applied photography frameworks. This course explores contradiction and ambiguity in photographic meaning and the role of aesthetic conventions in shaping an image’s function across contexts. Through the course, students will be expected to develop a coherent series of at least 10 images that applies a distinct treatment or aesthetic to a subject matter or multi-image narrative not typically represented in that style or aesthetic. Through this process, students will examine how visual codes, contextual shifts, and aesthetic strategies influence interpretation.

Materialized Photography- Spring 2025 - MAP1

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Materialized Photography- Spring 2025 - MAP1

with Felicity Hammond

In this module, we will explore the potential for the photographic image to simultaneously be a backdrop, object, and prop. We will make images both for the purpose of being re-imaged and for their sculptural possibilities, ending in a work that investigates the potential for an endless cycle of images and objects. Crucially, we will consider the staging of the work, and the conceptual and physical site for which it is intended.

Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2024 - MAP1

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Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2024 - MAP1

with Milo Keller

The course is a platform for the development of personal projects that arise from the desire and curiosity of each student. The basic concept of the work must be relevant to the field of contemporary photographic images. Each project can take a different form depending on the specificities, contents and inclinations of each participant. From books to multimedia installations, from performance to CGI, group discussions will articulate a plural vision of photography’s applications today.

Applied Photography - Fall – 2024

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Applied Photography - Fall – 2024

with Charles Negre

This course focuses on the ability to answer a commission within one’s own artistic practice, guiding students towards a deeper understanding of studio photography, the challenges of constructed images and the processes involved. With an emphasis on still life photography, this applied photography course aims to sharpen the students sensivity to photographing and interpreting objects. For this semester, the group of students will conceptualize, shoot, and designed an alternative issue of Paperboy Magazine. Founded by David McKendrick three years ago, Paperboy will serve as the creative platform for this project.

Photobook - Fall 2024 - MAP1

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Photobook - Fall 2024 - MAP1

with Bruno Ceschel

The photobook module introduces students to the history of photobooks and artists’ books and leads them to consider different strategies and approaches to contemporary book-making. In the first term students individually conceptualised a publication that have been designed, printed and distributed.