In a large colour photograph, a woman peers between a pair of men’s hirsute legs, looking straight at the camera. Donning a pair of shades, artist Pixy Liao crouches on a beach towel between her partner’s legs, his derriere clad in underwear printed with a vintage-grained image of a woman and a man running hand in hand. Look a little closer and you’ll notice a white phallic object dangling above her head. 

Titled ‘Comfort Zone’, Chinese-born New York-based photographer Pixy Liao’s solo exhibition at Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong, may leave some viewers feeling a little uncomfortable. And that is the point. Hers are works that playfully challenge societal gender and sexual norms. Since 2007, Liao has staged photographs, often posing with her partner and collaborator, Moro, for her ongoing Experimental Relationship project. 

Shanghai-born, Liao moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 2005 to pursue graduate studies in art. It was there that she met Moro —five years her junior —who was also studying photography, and a creative and romantic relationship followed. What initially started as self-portraits to document the relationship and get to know her partner, turned into a long-term project that helped the artist explore sexual and gender identity, as well as examine the dynamics of power and gender in a long-term relationship. 

In the introduction to her project Experimental Relationship,  Liao writes: “As a woman brought up in China, I used to think I could only love someone who is older and more mature than me, who can be my protector and mentor. Then I met my current boyfriend, Moro. Since he is five years younger than me, I felt that the whole concept of relationships changed, all the way around. I became a person who has more authority and power.’ 

In Liao’s photographs woman is not the supporting role in a relationship, but the main protagonist. Here we see woman as artistic creator and the male as muse, challenging conventional ideas of gender construction and roles, and subverting the traditional male gaze in art works. Where traditionally in art the female subject is constructed as the passive object and recipient of the male gaze for male fantasy and pleasure—her body fetishized and fragmented into consumable parts—in Liao’s work the female, the photographer herself, is reframed in a position of power and dominance. 

It is Liao’s gaze that more often than not confronts the viewer as she stares boldly at the lens. Liao positions the female gaze as a means of exerting power, over Moro and over the audience,in performative narratives staged in interiors and domestic landscapes, in which the couple look like they have been caught in the middle of something — wrestling, reading, or engaging in interstellar roleplay.

The exhibition is riddled with cheeky visual sexual puns. In Two Eggs and Twisted Eggs (both 2020) a pair of eggs encased in a white cloth, resembling testicles ­– symbolic of patriarchal power — are placed over the artist’s floral print-clad crotch, or squeezed between her red nail- varnished hands. Golden Mouse (2014) captures Liao’s hand, again with red varnished nails, resting upon Moro’s which holds a golden computer mouse. The skin to skin contact of hand upon hand suggests sensual intimacy, and domination, but the mouse scroll wheel peeking between their fingers —and the required flicking motion of the middle finger to use it—hints at female sexual anatomy and manual sex stimulation.

Many of Liao’s tongue-in-cheek images feature her clothed while her partner is naked, subverting conventional art historical depictions of women as sexual objects, such as in aforementioned titular beach photo, Comfort Zone (2020) which plays with the fashion photography trope­ of a woman’s legs framing the composition. In Holding (2014), Liao, dressed in a pink dress, cradles a naked Moro in a tender, motherly embrace on her lap as she lovingly looks at him, the scene resembling Michelangelo’s Pieta. 

After Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (2019) also takes its inspiration from art history, this time from the 18th century sculpture Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss by Antonio Canova. But here it is Liao who takes on the role of Cupid, son of Venus, re-enacting the moment before he revives the goddess Psyche (Moro). Liao looks boldly at the camera, her arm raised, holding up the cable release defiantly in a gesture that also looks like she is ready to spank a naked Moro draped over her lap, with undertones of S&M role play. 

Liao also documents the fluidity and shifting power and gender dynamics in her relationship with Moro—the push and pull, give and take required to maintain equilibrium—and the co-dependency and vulnerability that can develop in long-term intimate relationships. Sometimes it is hard to tell who is subduing whom, such as in the series of performative wrestling photographs, Bed Wrestling (2019) depicting the artist and her partner grappling on a mattress in spandex singlets. In Story Time (2022), wearing a red dress, with scarlet lips and painted nails, Liao reads French erotica to a submissive, naked and kneeling Moro. However, it is he who holds the camera cable release, in control of when the image is captured. 

Intertwined (2023) depicts the couple sitting in a bathtub facing one other, the camera cable release cord tied around both their necks, connecting the two together. Moro and Liao both hold the cable, signifying a sharing of power. Whereas in We Are Connected (2015), the couple stand in their undergarments, hands touching while looking at the camera, Moro holding the remote cable release control. A web of blood filled-tubes criss-cross to and from Moro and Liao’s body, connecting the two through the sharing of bodily fluids in a symbol of physical intimacy. 

Liao’s jocular and subversive photographs dismantle rigid gender roles and upend traditional heterosexual power dynamics. But ‘Comfort Zone’ is also a playful exploration of and glimpse into intimacy and connection, both physical and emotional, and the evolution of a relationship over time.