Glittering and woven, Shenlu Liu’s work seeks to champion rather than intellectualise the codes through which the body comprehends the world. In the 2025 piece Organolux (2025), knitted or woven elements reflect touch-sensitive light-emitting threads, a pathway for the viewer to re-establish their relationship with touch.
After studying fashion and textiles, Liu graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2024, positioning her as an artist with a deep background in the materials she works with. Her practice has paradoxically tried to counter visual-led aesthetics with an appreciation for the role that other senses, particularly touch, play in how we construct our comprehension of the world (Liu, 2025). The paradox is that her work is strikingly visual, luminescent, stimulating, so the question is whether she is actually championing touch or whether, by revealing the operations of the non-visual in a visual way, she isn’t doubling down on the primacy of sight.
Central to Liu’s work is what she considers a ‘crisis of perception’, the slow erosion of embodied experiences as contemporary life leans into virtualised, largely screen-based, flat visual symbols. In this view, the field of life has become a mediated intellectual exercise rather than one of resonant, critically physical, moments. Liu (2025) articulates this concern:
“The ‘crisis of perception’ I refer to is not a sudden collapse, but a slow and continuous erosion. In contemporary life, perception has become highly visualised, flattened, and optimised for efficiency. Touch is increasingly replaced by screens…. This disconnection between perception and the body is what I understand as a crisis.
It is within this context that my craft-based practice becomes a mechanism. Knitting, weaving, and embroidery rely on repetition… For me, these processes are not simply means to produce an outcome, but methods for recalibrating perception itself.
Through this process, the body is no longer merely an executor of actions, but re-emerges as a perceptual system in its own right…. not by generating more images, but by repairing the channels through which perception operates.”
By extension, the idea is that without a reflexive physical understanding of where we are, we are avoiding the question of how we’re actually feeling as beings with a body. It’s a subtle but strong point, one reminiscent of Foucauldian biopolitics (Foucault, 1976, 1978)—a philosophical lens through which the ways in which we are situated in the world, dictate the reality of how we are governed. Our bodies provide the locus of control around issues such as health, gender, sexuality, housing and so forth, which intersect political power and biological life (Foucault, 1978). By directing our attention towards a bio-based understanding of experience, Liu’s work tacitly comments on those issues by making us aware of the increasingly taken-for-granted silences that are emerging when we focus on the image-led symbolic realities—’how do I appear?’—rather than more fundamental and personal experiences such as ‘what does it mean to be sitting here in a cold flat with a winter cold?’. Such a focus leads to more pointed existential questions than how many likes you get or wondering how seeing your friend’s wedding pictures makes you feel.
A creative process that Liu employs is the creation of ’emotional landscapes’, a vehicle she takes pains to describe as events in themselves rather than templates to be ‘decoded’. Liu (2025) explains:
“What I refer to as ‘emotional landscapes’ is not an abstract depiction of a psychological state, but an externalised and structured inner space.
These emotional landscapes are not meant to be decoded, but to be entered. As viewers move through them, visually, physically, and tactually, they resonate differently with each structure, activating their own emotional experiences. Emotion shifts from being an internal psychological event to a spatial condition that can be shared, sensed, and temporarily held.”
Sitting somewhere between Chiharu Shiota’s textile installations, Tabita Rezaire’s work to decolonise her body and re-establish an autonomy of awareness, and the experiential compositions of James Turrell, who creates vehicles for heightened states of perception, Liu’s emotional landscapes use the tactile, and sometimes interactive, nature of textiles to emphasise materiality as a foundation for a rediscovery of body consciousness.
In this respect, she’s akin to new-materialist philosophers like Jane Bennett, who shift a cosmological perspective from being ego-centric to something that recognises matter’s inherent being as distinct from the Anthropocene (Bennett, 2010). A key development in Liu’s work is that she wants us to be cognisant of the physical consciousness that we have as distinct from the strategy-led visual-linguistic way we encounter a mediated world of images. A position through which her use of textiles recalls both Elissa Auther’s (2009) statement that:
“Fibre art made a claim for the body as a site of knowledge production”
and Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) assertion that:
“The body is our general medium for having a world.”
The structural aspects of her work Organolux (2025) pick up on both the new-materialism of Bennett and embodied understanding of Merleau-Ponty, where the threads and LED strings appear like constellations or neural networks, a theme that runs through her other sculptures that start with the title SiO2. A series of sorts that draws on the idea of crystal field energy through the structural arrangement of materials like optical fibre, LED strips, shape-memory yarn, UV resin, core-spun yarn, clear nylon line, and glass beads to suggest the invisible flows of energy that interact with the presence of the viewer, an energy reacting to an energy. While not as directly interactive as Organolux (2025), the series gives an impression of the ways our presence is part of a wider field of being.
As the viewer moves around the works, different aspects of the structure are revealed, and different relations between structure and space become apparent. In that sense, the works behave like sculptures and face challenges with viewers’ expectations. Beautiful, yes, but without careful attention viewers might risk overlooking the depth the artist presents. As an artist clearly approaching a very important topic with the genuine vigour of originality, the achievements of the SiO2 series in signalling a shift towards body consciousness and the interactive vigour of Organolux (2025) show an artist reaching for the sublime.
As seen above, the video narrates a bodily experience, explaining sensations like a guided meditation, ends with a revelatory demonstration of the accompanying piece. A piece that yearns to be experienced, one imagines that some skilful macro-photography, extreme slow motion of someone touching the work, capturing the ensuing changes — light reflecting on hands, the play of light and shadow, structure and void — would allow online viewers into the physical world as per the artist’s vision. But as it is we are given a tantalising invitation of the physical work. Itself a message to experience things directly. The artist has staked a claim to a rich vein of creative endeavour and one feels she has more to say in order to capture the emotional landscape, in scale, in execution, and in narrative silence. Art’s boundaries in that respect are endless.
Shenlu Liu the artist has proven herself to be ambitious, original, and has a definite future. High praise with few caveats. The best of this emerging artist is yet to come. One imagines that speculative collectors’ ears have pricked up at these words and they should. It is a rare thing to find a talent with a novel vision. What do we want to see? Her ideas written on the scale of Shiota and Turrell’s. She already has the clarity of Rezaire. But unlike Rezaire, where the threat of over-explanation might bog her down into the minimising depths of narrative topicality, Liu seems committed to letting her pieces speak for themselves. A place where the viewer is not a bystander, cut off from a personal connection. Liu’s work conveys her intention. We can imagine the grander works on the way, but already she makes an important statement that other worlds await us in the reality of our physical being. A step forward into solidity.
Shenlu Liu Website
Images courtesy of the artist © Shenlu Liu
This review is part of a supported series on emerging artists including Shenlu Liu.
Bubliography
Auther, E. (2010) String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Foucault, M. (1976) The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge. Translated by R. Hurley (1998). London: Penguin Books.
Foucault, M. (1978) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978. Translated by G. Burchell (2004). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Liu, S. (2025) Artist Statement. Available at:https://liushenlu2000.wixsite.com/shenlu (Accessed: 30 December 2025).
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945) Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by D. A. Landes (2012). Abingdon: Routledge.
Education
2023-2024 Royal College of Art, London, UK
Master of Art in Textiles Design
2018-2022 Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, Beijing China
Bachelor of Art in Fashion Design (Knitwear)
Exhibitions
2025 What Holds, What Drifts , 3×3 Art Space, Tokyo, Japan
2025 She Looked Back , Purist Gallery, London, UK
2025 Aria of the Unheard , Sol de Paris, Paris, France
2024 Luna Gallery solo Exhibition, Beijing, China
2024 Royal College of Art Degree Show, London, UK
Ex-London based reader of art and culture. LSE Masters Graduate. Arts and Culture writer since 1995 for Future Publishing, Conde Nast, Wig Magazine and Oyster. Specialist subjects include; media, philosophy, cultural aesthetics, contemporary art and French wine. When not searching for road-worn copies of eighteenth-century travelogues he can be found loitering in the inspirational uplands of art galleries throughout Europe.
