All images by Pixy Liao. Used with permission.
What is love? Hollywood will have us believe it’s perfection. Reality, however, teaches us it’s imperfect, it’s messy, complicated, raw, sexy and pure. It’s a journey for sure. Sometimes short, other times long, but we all have our love story. For Chinese photographer Pixy Liao, her love story was an opportunity to photograph and create a visual ode to her significant other.
Pixy Liao.
For Your Eyes Only tells the story of two lovers, Pixy and Moro. Started in 2012 — and still ongoing — Liao has created a series of frames that zones in on the mundane, repetitiveness of life, and how two people can fill it with excitement in wonderfully creative ways.
The work is provocative, and doesn’t shy away from the sexual intimacy partners can enjoy. Though Liao doesn’t seem to take sex overly seriously, and can see the humor that stems from two people exploring each other’s bodies and sexuality.
The starting point of the series was simple. “The love I have for my partner and the desire to see the image I love.” No grand concept. Just the impulse to look and to keep looking.
The series moves between tenderness, humor and provocation, but Liao frames it as a celebration of the small stuff. “Small intimate moments that we share.” What’s interesting is that she doesn’t see it primarily as a love story. For Liao, the series is really an experiment in composition and color, using bodies as her raw material. The relationship is the context, not the subject.
Her partner is rarely identifiable in the shots, which raises the obvious question: how does he feel about being part of it? As it turns out, he barely notices. The photoshoots run alongside her other project, Experimental Relationship, so there’s no real shift for him on set. “Most of the time, you can’t tell who the person is, just part of the body,” Liao explains. The anonymity is built into the frame. He’s not exposed so much as abstracted, and that distance seems to make all the difference.
The props scattered through the series; jello, fruit, flowers, aren’t especially curated either. “This project is less staged, more on instinct and with any props we have at hand.” Casual and unforced, which is exactly how it reads.
Asked to pair a soundtrack to her photographic love store, Liao doesn’t hesitate. She goes straight to Banana Banana by PIMO, which, as it happens, is her and her partner’s band. The series and the song are made by the same two people, in the same spirit. “It’s short, simple and pure graphics,” she says. Unpretentious, a little playful, and completely personal. Much like the work itself.
And it’s not stopping. For Your Eyes Only continues to run alongside Experimental Relationship by design, giving Liao the compositional freedom that the other project doesn’t allow. As long as one continues, so will the other.
You can enjoy more work by Pixy Liao by visiting her website, Instagram and Facebook.
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