Pixy Liao

What happens if a man and a woman switch roles when it comes to sex and power?

An exhibition exploring sex, dominance and powerful women

Pixy Liao’s personal and intimate photographs are currently exhibited at Fotografiska Stockholm. Your Gaze Belongs to Me challenges views on heterosexual relationships and explores what dominance could look like.

For 15 years, Pixy Liao and her boyfriend/muse Moro, a Shanghai-based musician she met in college, have been exploring and pushing the boundaries of what a relationship is and the expected gender roles in a heterosexual couple. The exhibition, which contains of more than one hundred images, focuses on portraying the dynamic of their relationship but is also challenging conventional socio-cultural ideas of gender constructions and questions of nationality in a globalized world.

Their age differences (Liao is five years older than Moro) and their native origins (Japanese vs Chinese) are two starting points in the project. But Pixy Liao is also interested in powerful women and female leadership. And by revealing uncomfortable aspects she also puts herself in charge of the spectator’s gaze.

-Moro made me realize that heterosexual relationships do not need to be standardized. The purpose of the experiment is to break the inherent relationship model and reach a new equilibrium, says Pixy Liao.

The project is an ongoing, long-term experiment with staged photographs. Pixy Liao’s images are composed so that the combination of colours, shapes and focus attract us towards the most uncomfortable yet revealing aspects. In a world that idealizes the female body and always originates from the western beauty ideal, Liao’s photographs present new and modern options.

Exhibition posters

Exhibition posters can be found here (https://www.fotografiska.com/sto/shop/pixy-liao).