Quiet Tensions: Intimacy, Solitude, and Affect in Tia Liu’s Visual Practice

Tia Liu is a London-based visual artist working across fine-art photography and moving image. Educated at the University of the Arts London (MA, 2022–2024) and Jinan University, Guangzhou (BA, 2014–2018), Ting has developed a research-led practice that explores intimacy, memory, and emotional vulnerability within contemporary social conditions.

Working with fragments rather than fixed narratives, her images attend closely to bodies, gestures, and everyday interior spaces, allowing ambiguity and emotional residue to remain present. Across both photography and film, Ting resists spectacle in favor of quiet tension and softness, treating vulnerability not as fragility but as a mode of strength and sustained attention.

A Tokyo Toy Story Series

In What if we were lovers?, Ting examines dating culture as a site where intimacy is continuously proposed yet perpetually deferred. Using photography as a relational and conceptual framework rather than a documentary one, the series explores encounters shaped by anticipation, projection, and emotional risk. The work resists romanticization or sociological explanation; instead, it foregrounds the emotional residue of near-connections, positioning love as a speculative state rather than an achieved condition. Within contemporary fine-art photography, the project aligns with practices that use lived interaction as material while maintaining a critical distance from confessional or illustrative modes.

What If We Were Lovers Series

Furthermore, A Lover’s Discourse marks a decisive expansion of Ting’s photographic thinking into artist film, situating moving image as a medium for articulating interior states rather than external events. Drawing conceptual inspiration from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, the film adopts a fragmented, reflective structure that rejects linear storytelling in favor of psychological rhythm and affective drift. Love is not presented as a cohesive narrative but as a sequence of thoughts, sensations, and projections that resist coherence.

A Lovers Discourse Film

Spoken language unfolds alongside tactile, symbolic imagery, producing a tension between what is articulated and what remains unresolved. This disjunction situates the work within the traditions of essay film and experimental cinema, where meaning emerges through accumulation and delay rather than resolution. The film’s pacing and attention to duration allow emotional intensity to surface gradually, reinforcing the instability of the lover’s position.

A Lovers Discourse Film

Set entirely within the confines of a bedroom, the film transforms a private interior into a site of emotional processing. The absence of external encounters shifts the focus inward: desire, doubt, and longing are revisited in solitude rather than resolved through interaction. The bedroom operates simultaneously as architectural space and psychological container, underscoring the labor involved in sustaining romantic feeling. Transformation, here, is not achieved through closure but through sustained reflection, repetition, and attention to emotional residue.

The work contributes to contemporary discourse on post-digital intimacy by offering a restrained meditation on how love is cognitively and affectively negotiated.

A Lovers Discourse Film

Moreover, Caroline deepens Ting’s investigation into intimacy by turning toward solitude as an active emotional condition. The series presents a solitary female figure navigating moments of quiet vulnerability, where intimacy no longer circulates between subjects but folds inward. Loneliness is depicted as as presence, shaped by longing, expectation, and deferred connection.

Caroline Series

Formally, the images are marked by compositional restraint. Gestures are minimal, movement suspended. The body appears caught between opposing impulses: reaching outward while simultaneously withdrawing. This tension is not resolved but held, allowing emotional meaning to accumulate through stillness and pause. Ting’s refusal of expressive excess positions the work within fine-art photographic traditions that privilege psychological density over visual drama.

The domestic interior functions as an extension of the subject’s interiority. Architecture, light, and spatial containment echo the emotional atmosphere of waiting and uncertainty, reinforcing the sense that intimacy here is temporal rather than relational. What the images offer are traces rather than encounters, and afterimages of connection that remain incomplete.

Caroline Series

Caroline demonstrates Ting’s ability to use photography to sustain ambiguity. By withholding narrative explanation, the work allows viewers to remain within the unresolved space of feeling. It contributes to contemporary photography by showing how minimal gesture and spatial control can articulate complex emotional states without recourse to overt symbolism or storytelling.

Taken together, these three bodies of work form a coherent artistic trajectory in which photography and moving image operate as complementary modes of inquiry. What if we were lovers? establishes the relational and social conditions of contemporary intimacy; A Lover’s Discourse internalizes these conditions through time, voice, and reflection; Caroline distils them into stillness and solitary embodiment. Across all three, Ting demonstrates a rigorous engagement with the formal and conceptual possibilities of fine-art photography and moving image.

Ting’s practice contributes meaningfully to contemporary visual culture by articulating intimacy as an unstable, ongoing negotiation rather than a resolved state. Through restraint, fragmentation, and sustained attention to affect, her work positions photography and moving image as critical tools for understanding the emotional textures of post-digital life.

Find more of her works here:

Website: https://tialiuting.com/

Lena Snow,

editor and founder of the Goddessarts Magazine