Eternal Cycle (Residue)

Outlook Gallery

Mar 9

Eternal Cycle (Residue) by Florence Lanxuan Liu explores the transformation and discipline of identity, memory, and the collective body within social structures.

This work begins with an intimate act of collection: discarded garments from friends and family. These clothes once served as the skin of social roles, visible markers of gender, profession, and relationship. In this work, these fabrics, carrying expired identities, are systematically cut apart, blended, and indiscriminately stuffed into translucent casings. This process is a ritualized dissolution, allowing fixed personal identities to expire and be fragmented into a communal, depersonalized residue.

The resulting forms of hanging “sausages” suggest a state of contradictory coexistence: they are both an aggregation of personal histories into a regenerated whole and a disciplined body in which its uniform hanging implies constraint. This visual tension mirrors the forces that shape and dissolve the individual, tracing a metamorphosis from distinct identity into collective material.

Within the street-facing vitrine of the MCBA Outlook Gallery, this private transformation is made public. The hanging bodies engage with the act of shài (晒): to hang, to expose, and to exhibit. This act opens the intimate materials to the communal gaze. The process itself is a form of bodily writing where cutting is editing, sewing and sequencing are binding, together composing a legible narrative of the contemporary social body.