Tianqi Liao is a photographer whose practice explores psychological atmosphere, constructed realities, and the tension between aspiration and alienation. Through photography, Tianqi creates images that investigate perception, emotional memory, and the instability of idealized spaces. Her work often isolates objects, environments, and visual arrangements from their original contexts, repositioning them within unfamiliar narrative conditions that question their symbolic function and cultural associations. Moving between hyperreal visual language and subtle emotional ambiguity, Tianqi projects examine how images shape consciousness, desire, and collective belief systems within contemporary visual culture.
Could you introduce your practice and what first drew you to the forms and materials you work with?
My practice primarily revolves around photography, though I often think less in terms of medium and more in terms of perception, atmosphere, and the ways images shape how we understand reality. I’m interested in photography not simply as a recording device but as a tool that can construct worlds, influence desire, and shape emotional and social experience.
What first drew me to photography was its peculiar relationship to truth. A photograph feels inherently believable, yet it can simultaneously fabricate narratives, aspirations, and forms of longing. I’ve always been interested in that contradiction and in the ways images quietly influence how we see ourselves and the world around us.
A lot of my work begins with observing how people construct ideals around beauty, intimacy, success, leisure, or fulfillment, and how fragile those ideals can become when examined more closely. I’m interested in the visual systems that support those beliefs: architecture, objects, lighting, landscapes, advertisements, and carefully designed environments. Rather than using images to provide answers, I often use them to investigate experiences that resist direct articulation. I’m interested in what remains unresolved, in the afterimage something leaves behind, and in the uneasy coexistence between attraction and estrangement, sincerity and performance, intimacy and distance.
I’m also interested in isolating specific objects or environments from their original contexts and repositioning them within unfamiliar narrative conditions. Once removed from their intended function, familiar things can begin to feel strange. Through that process, I think about how meaning becomes attached to images, objects, and places, and how those meanings shape our understanding of reality.
Your work often moves between different mediums and visual languages. What guides your decisions when developing a new piece or project?
The medium usually emerges from the needs of a particular project rather than from a predetermined preference. Photography often serves as the starting point because it allows me to isolate and reframe fragments of reality, but not every idea can be fully contained within a single image.
I usually begin by thinking about the conditions I want the viewer to encounter. Sometimes that experience is best communicated through a photograph, where attention can be concentrated within a highly controlled frame. Other times a project becomes more concerned with space, sequencing, duration, or physical presence, and that may require a different form.
I’m less interested in maintaining a consistent aesthetic than in allowing each project to develop its own internal logic. Some bodies of work become highly staged and carefully orchestrated, while others remain observational or fragmentary. The decision is usually guided by what the subject itself seems to demand.
Even as the visual language changes, certain questions continue to recur throughout the work. I remain interested in how images shape belief, how environments influence perception, and how visual culture produces ideals that people both pursue and struggle to inhabit. Moving between mediums becomes a way of approaching those questions from different perspectives rather than arriving at a single answer.
Many of your works seem to explore subtle emotional or psychological spaces. What kinds of experiences or questions tend to shape your imagery?
I’m often drawn to environments that have been designed to communicate a promise. Luxury hotels, leisure spaces, themed environments, corporate interiors, model homes, commercial displays, and carefully maintained public spaces all interest me because they present an idealized version of reality. These places are often designed to evoke aspiration, comfort, desire, or belonging, yet they can also reveal something more complicated beneath the surface.
A lot of my work begins by observing the gap between what an environment promises and what it actually produces psychologically. I’m interested in moments where familiarity begins to feel unfamiliar, where a space that initially appears inviting starts to feel slightly artificial, performative, or difficult to fully trust.
I’m also interested in how environments become entangled with memory. Certain places can function almost like emotional containers, carrying traces of personal experience, fantasy, or cultural projection. Often a project begins with an intuitive attraction to a particular image or setting long before I understand why it feels significant.
Many of the recurring subjects in my work—aspiration, alienation, idealization, and belonging—emerge from trying to understand why people continue investing in certain visions of fulfillment even when those visions remain elusive. Rather than rejecting those desires, I’m interested in examining what they reveal about how we navigate contemporary life.
Process appears to play an important role in your practice. How do experimentation and material exploration influence the final outcome of your work?
Experimentation is essential to my process because I rarely begin with a fully resolved idea. Making becomes a way of thinking. I often discover what a project is actually about through the act of producing it rather than beforehand.
My process usually involves collecting far more material than I eventually use. I photograph extensively, accumulate fragments, and spend long periods editing, sequencing, and revisiting images. Often the meaning of a project emerges through the relationships that develop between images over time rather than through any single photograph.
I’m particularly interested in how subtle shifts in light, scale, texture, color, or spatial arrangement can completely alter the atmosphere of an image. Because of that, I try to remain open to accidents and unexpected outcomes.
How have the people and communities around you influenced your work?
The people around me influence the work less through direct representation and more through conversation, observation, and shared experience. Living between different cultural and social environments has made me increasingly aware of how identity, aspiration, and belonging are constructed through images.
I’ve been particularly influenced by conversations with artists, writers, curators, and people working across different creative disciplines. Those exchanges often challenge my assumptions and introduce new ways of thinking about perception, visual culture, and the social lives of images.
At the same time, much of the work emerges from a more solitary process. I spend a great deal of time observing, collecting impressions, and allowing ideas to develop slowly. While communities create the conditions that make the work possible, the actual process of making often involves a long period of reflection and distance from immediate social experience.
I think that balance between participation and observation has become an important part of the practice. I’m interested in being both inside and outside the environments I photograph, close enough to understand them but distant enough to question them.
Do you have any advice that you would offer to others?
I think it’s important to allow yourself to make work before fully understanding it. There can be pressure to explain everything immediately, but some ideas require time before they become clear. Often the most meaningful projects begin with intuition rather than certainty.
I also think it’s important to pay attention to what repeatedly returns in your work. Certain subjects, images, questions, or obsessions tend to persist over time, even when you aren’t consciously trying to pursue them. Those recurring interests often reveal more about your practice than the concepts you initially assign to it.
text & photo courtesy of Tianqi Liao
- Website: https://www.tianqi-liao.com
- Instagram: @tiann.qi
