Enxi Liu (b. 2001) holds a Master of Research degree from the Royal College of Art in the UK and graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the Experimental Art Department of Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts in China. She often poetically explores the various possibilities of sensory time combined with the body through performance, photography, and video. In her work, the connection of personal bodily experiences and self-reflective practices intertwines with a prolonged sense of time, embedding elements such as identity, memory, perception, and traces into a slow and subtle cycle of existence.

Could you please tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I am an artist navigating the boundaries between creation and research, utilizing media such as moving image, performance, and painting. My practice is rooted in a long-term exploration of time, memory, and embodied perception. Rather than focusing on social time, which is disciplined by standard clocks and the logic of efficiency, I am more concerned with the internal sense of time, those durations that cannot be measured precisely but profoundly impact our existence, such as waiting, slowness, duration, repetition, vanishing, and the subtle memories carried by the body as an archive.

My personal perception and internal rhythm lean naturally toward slowness. This has prompted me to use the body as the core medium for exploration, treating it as a site for sensing, enduring, and stretching time. As my practice deepened through moving image and performance, time manifested as a material and extensive presence. I view this artistic journey as a recursive movement between creative practice and theoretical inquiry. It is a quest to find the most authentic scale of existence within the flux of imagery and the breathing of a specific site.

What are the main themes or concepts you explore in your work?

The core of my work revolves around “non-linear duration” and “slowness as resistance.” I focus on the crisis of temporal perception experienced in an era of algorithmic logic and technological acceleration, seeking to touch the boundaries of perception through bodily actions to reconstruct alienated time.

Much of my creation focuses on “cycles of recurrence,” “durations of suspended waiting,” and “the time of maintaining endurance.” Combining Henri Bergson’s philosophical reflection on durée and Lisa Baraitser’s ethical concepts of enduring, I treat time as an embodied and textured experience. Through bodily endurance and site-specific intervention, I construct a non-human-centric temporal perspective, guiding the audience to gaze at fragile traces, long waits, and the breathtaking tension between existence and vanishing.

In the work ELEVATED, OVERLAP, for instance, I transform the repetitive carrying of bricks into a Sisyphean labor, attempting to touch the profound truth of life within futile, mundane, and useless mechanical work. In LOOM, I utilize candlelight and multi-layered performance projections to build a Platonic cave-like “time-lag dream” within a space, exploring the boundaries between material existence and illusion, as well as the intersection of imagery across multiple timelines.

Your work explores the experience of time through the body. How do you approach translating these sensations into visual or performative forms?

My process usually begins with a sensory tremor or the expression of a specific concept. The body is a site where time deposits, stagnates, and eventually becomes perceptible. In natural environments, I pay close attention to the rise and fall of breath, the limits of endurance, the imbalance of gravity, and the microscopic flow between the body and natural elements such as water, dust, and wind. This is a form of embodied mapping. On tidal coasts or sand dunes, I use long takes, minimalist visuals, and sustained performance to translate these intuitive sensations into visual language.

In the work SLUMBERING WITH SEA, I positioned my body on the tide line where sunrise and sunset alternate, letting waves and salt grains erode my boundaries. This recorded the cyclical intersection of bodily time and the rhythmic time of nature, as well as the dissolution of life being worn through by the natural world. In my recent work DRIFTING INTO DUNES, this transformation takes on a more material thickness. I used sand to fill and repair the hollows of a decaying wooden boat, then sealed it with transparent film. When the film was peeled away, the “negative space” left by the boat’s silhouette in the sand became the residue left by peeling time.

I intend to ask: in the age of technological media, when we attempt to record, repair, or seal an existence with new technology, are we also accelerating its disappearance and oblivion? The boundary between existence and vanishing might be like the Ship of Theseus. Through this slow rhythm, I guide the lens to capture the vanishing that is currently occurring, creating a gentle and continuous pressure that forces the viewer’s breathing to synchronize with the screen. The image becomes a space of concentration, and the performance is not just the movement itself, but a scale left by the body in time.

How do personal memory and collective experience interact in your projects?

To me, memory is not a sealed archive, but rather like water dispersing into water or overlapping ripples. I often start from personal feelings such as waiting, looking back, stagnation, weightlessness, drifting, or a sense of lag that is difficult to name accurately. However, personal memory itself carries echoes of society, environment, and history; it is always in a relationship with larger temporal structures, constantly oscillating.

In my projects, I place specific bodily experiences into more open fields, allowing them to resonate with natural rhythms, material substances, geological qualities, and even the life experiences of the audience. In this way, memory is no longer a closed self-narrative, but a temporal field that can be entered, projected onto, and felt collectively by others.

In the moving image work TIME IN TIME, I constructed a dual timeline: the linear journey of a moving train and the cyclical memories that keep flooding back. This individualized narrative of a protagonist returning home actually maps a collective sense of stagnation and waiting in the post-pandemic era. The text serves as a second track interspersed throughout the work. The confessions of “I am waiting… I am waiting…” overlap with blurry, abstract images, entering a space where the past, present, and memory are projections of one another. It is through this instability that personal experience becomes a shared space for cognition, projection, or reflection.

What are your thoughts on the use of technology and digital platforms in the art world today?

This is a paradoxical issue, and my attitude toward technology and digital platforms is complex. On one hand, digitalization has indeed brought unprecedented global connectivity and communication efficiency. It allows artworks to be disseminated more widely and makes it easier for artists from different regions to establish connections, share creations, and be seen by viewers. Yet, what coexists with this is a “crisis of perception”, profound life experiences are being compressed into quickly consumable visual information and pixelated fragments.

Therefore, I remain vigilant against the logic of acceleration behind technology. My work has always been a response to the sensory fatigue caused by this acceleration. In DRIFTING INTO DUNES, I reflected on the phenomenon of “existence being sealed as data,” warning against the irreversible erosion of reality. I do not reject technology, but I am more concerned with whether we can use moving images and digital media to counter-create a slower, more focused, and more immersive way of observing. I hope digital platforms are not just windows for information distribution, but can also become gateways for deep diving, allowing the audience to encounter the breathtaking, slow, and enduring quality of life the moment their fingertips swipe across the screen.

How do you manage feedback or criticism, especially in the context of public exhibitions?

I view feedback as a part of the ongoing growth of a work’s life. Once a work enters a public space, it escapes the singular control of the artist and is reorganized through the gaze of the audience and spatial relationships. Different feedback makes me realize which parts are truly felt, which parts need more clarity, or which paths of understanding I had not originally anticipated.

I distinguish between different types of criticism. Some feedback is more about presentation methods, spatial logic, or textual expression; these are very helpful to me because they drive the work to become more accurate. Other feedback may be related to viewing habits. For example, the audience may expect a more direct narrative, more information input, or a faster pace, whereas my work often specifically requires staying, slowness, and openness. In such cases, I view it as a question: how does the work challenge existing ways of viewing? The tension arising from this “untimeliness” proves the effectiveness of art as a means of intervention. Therefore, criticism is not an obstacle for me, but an opportunity to help me re-understand the relationship between the work and the audience.

Text and photo courtesy of Enxi Liu

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