Liwen 丽雯 سليمة

Liwen Lian is a Hui-Chinese 回族 visual artist, designer, and community arts labourer. They hold a Bachelor of Interior Design (Honours) from RMIT University. Their practice explores how visual and material culture—objects, technologies, and environments—shape, distort, and reimagine identities and notions of humanness.

Working collaboratively across photography, fashion, architecture, digital design, and fine art, Liwen creates surrealist and poetic performances, films, and installations where they navigate the tensions between selfhood and systemic structures, weaving narratives from fragments of personal and collective memory.

Beyond their studio practice, Liwen facilitates community arts workshops and has been a guest speaker for City Stories, a research project initiated by UnStudio and presented at MPavilion. They recently completed the Young Creatives Lab residency at SIGNAL Arts, supported by the City of Melbourne.

Areas of Interest:
Autoethnography, Fiction, Alienation, Migration, Subculture, Language, Urbanisation, Social Progress, Production and Product, Globalisation, Ecology, Non-Human Entities, Value System, High and Low Techonology, Sensing, Machine Aesthetic, Cold War Histories, Soviet Architecture, Hui People in China, Silk Road, Comparison of Western and Eastern Spiritualities &Philosophy

Photo by Jiaxi Wang

“This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion...Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters... In our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling.”

A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Centry, 1985, Donna Haraway

Publication Design