-- Artist statement
Intimacy is an arena of mutual participation, and it is not about eliminating distance, but instead about accommodating difference. Sweet Feedback presents moments of the practice of love in everyday life. The project aims to demonstrate that the boundaries between subject and object, belonging and rejecting, dominating and submitting, offering and taking, gaining and losing, and pleasure and pain are all blurred. It seems that there is nothing absolute in an intimate relationship, nor in love. Sweet Feedback focuses on the fluidity in intimacy and recalls the idea of love as a force.
Sweet Feedback also depicts the relationships between body parts and the relationships between the objects in everyday life, aiming to use them as metaphors for the contradiction inherent in intimacy.
Pain and struggle we had in the past seem to have disappeared as we cannot physically feel them anymore. But the emotional pain and struggle still stay with us no matter how much time has passed. When trying to find a way of healing the pain, we need to go back to our memory. Every time the sad memory is evoked, we have to suffer once again. Therefore, healing is also a kind of hurt.
Untitled Pain is a serial of photographs of healthy human skin with objects known for healing and protecting added onto the surface of the prints. But the moment when they are intentionally sewn or inserted through the photo paper, they not only refer to what kind of pain and struggle they represent, but also become new harms or scars on the clean and soft skin.
Ruihua Liang is a fine art photographer. She focuses on portraiture and still objects, aiming to explore the complications and contradictions of intimate relationships. Born in Guangzhou, China, Liang is currently a graduate student in the fine art photography program at Parsons School of Design. Her work has been exhibited in China, the US and the Netherlands.
More information: www.ruihualiang.com
