ARC Review | The wordplay of Liao Wen's "Trust Fall" - a final answer to the suspended liminality?

Written by Chen Yuan

Liao Wen: Trust Fall
MACA Art Center, Beijing
March 22 - June 15

“Trust fall" is a team-building exercise in which participants turn their backs to others, falling backwards with their eyes closed, relying on their peers to catch them. On the surface level, Liao Wen’s eponymous exhibition appears to recall the individual’s adaptation to collective discipline, given that the two artworks are encircled by barriers used for crowd control. Yet, this presentation could also be interpreted as a wordplay on the very concept of "trust."


At the centre of the exhibition space stands the eponymous installation Trust Fall (2023-2025). In this work--which is composed of a stainless-steel staircase, a wooden statue and nylon rope--Liao Wen intentionally “removes” the role of "coach" and "other participants" from the original team-building exercise, leaving only a life-sized wooden puppet representing the main character of the game: its body frozen in a tense posture, hands clasped to its chest, suspended by a single thin rope. It is placed in a liminal moment on the verge of falling, a state of delicate tension that renders its isolation palpable from every perspective. Viewers can climb the staircase or stand beneath the puppet to immerse themselves in its oppressive presence, while neither way would be able to alter its doomed "ending". Within the predetermined circuit, viewers are confined to passive observation or perception, with no means to interaction or establishing the mutual trust that is vital to the game. In this sense, precisely due to the absence of integrated relational construction, "trust" collapsed and fell.


The second work, Wanderer (2024–2025), presents a supine figure curled upon a metal wheelbarrow. This work draws its inspiration from a past encounter: At Café de Coral, a chain restaurant in Hong Kong, Liao Wen once met a wheelchair-dependent woman who had bilateral above-knee amputations; from avoiding eye contact, sitting in awkward silence, to exchanging a few words while sharing a table, until finally this woman unexpectedly gave her a discount coupon for the meal. Distinct from her other works, in creating Wanderer, Liao Wen strategically "fractured" the tibia and fibula of the all-limewood figure with a metal intrusion, while keeping the modification marks visible on the kneecap, to reveal how society seeks to shape our perceptions of bodily diversity through certain insidious "corrective" paradigms--and how such disciplinary mechanisms would subtly erode the foundations of human equality and trust. Liao Wen's experience of relocating from mainland China to Hong Kong can also be related to this work. The distrust and constraint generated from language barrier and identity difference are presented through the context of this work: just as the encircling turnstiles and crowd-control barriers around the work, through recreating the pathways of access-control queues, they intend to demarcate the boundaries between legal and illegal, inclusion and exclusion.


Based on the curatorial concept, these rules exist precisely to provoke transgression. Viewers can still apply those subtle daily acts of resistance within the exhibition space: ducking under the fence, bypassing the turnstiles, striding over the barriers, or even pushing the Wanderer around the room. The artist and curatorial team meticulously adjusted the height of the barriers to ensure the work can move freely throughout the space. However, does this arrangement truly suggest more freedom? Or does it instead place everything into a larger system of discipline? Considering this is still an exhibition space that requires admission tickets, and the mag card is nothing but a permission of one-way access, even if one strictly follows the rules, swiping the card to open each turnstile, the obstacles are still inevitable at the exit. Just like the inconspicuous statement in consumer agreements, "The merchant reserves the right of final interpretation", no one could really exist outside the constraints of rules--especially when the narrative of control resides with some larger power structures which are beyond the visible. In this sense, the pre-set "trust" relationship of the exhibition has already became ruptured and asymmetrical, devolving into an elaborate theater of power: the seemingly spontaneous acts of transgression are nothing but a fleeting mirage of revolt, temporarily tolerated by the very authority they appear to challenge. In other words, if the discussions of freedom can only happen within the predetermined framework of the power system, then this very fact would reveal how impregnable the structured boundaries are, and the fundamental impotence of such discussions.


By creating a playground that permits participation while constraining action, Liao Wen appears to echo Claire Bishop's notion of "interaction" in participatory art--in which, the game itself serves as a metaphor for various social relations, while "participation" is the "central strategy and ethos for democratic cultural production" [1]. This may precisely be the final answer that Liao Wen intends to present for engaging with the "suspended liminality": to examine those tangible and intangible cords and rules, to question systems that are constantly being enforced and tested, to unveil the operational mechanisms of power structures; then to reflect, to resist, to imagine, all the way to the ultimate transformation.