Liao Jiaming (b. 1992, Guangdong) works across photography, video, installation, and performance. His research interrogates the entanglement of technology, ideology, and embodied subjectivity within diasporic and networked contexts.
Grounded in his experience as a queer person navigating mainland China, Hong Kong, and digital space, his early photographic works destabilized the image as a site of desire, surveillance, and projection. Through manipulation, distortion, and material translation, he questioned photography’s indexical authority and examined how digital circulation reshapes intimacy and self-fashioning. Projects such as Do You Know Where the Birds Are? (2019–2022), The Intouchable (2021), and Too Good to Be True (2021) mark this phase.
His subsequent practice expands toward techno-social infrastructures—including social media architectures, algorithmic vision, and artificial intelligence—as systems that both
discipline and promise to optimize the human body. Rather than treating the body as representation, Liao mobilizes his own and others’ bodies as operational media through which normative constructions of gender, productivity, and collective identity are rehearsed and contested. This trajectory informs works such as Repetition Maximum (2021), Better Than Ever (2022–2026), The Creator (2023), and ongoing project How to Find Balance on Water (2025–).
His ongoing research examines ideological biases embedded in technological development. Drawing on posthumanist and cybernetic frameworks, projects including The Arcana Intelligent (2022–) critically probe AI’s epistemological claims. He is currently researching digital avatars and the history of radio calisthenics (廣播體操) in East Asia, extending his inquiry into the technological modulation of collective bodies.