Thomas Liu le Lann & l’écriture du moi

Interview Nele Jackson

Thomas Liu Le Lann is a Swiss artist who creates sculptures and installations in multiple techniques using fabric, glass, wood, photography, poetry and found objects. Often, his work is inspired by his personal (romantic) encounters, toying with juxtapositions of materiality, scale, and perspective. Frequently, his exhibitions feature “soft heroes” as protagonists – oversized plush figures with human mannerisms that populate the reimagined autobiographical landscapes. We spoke to him about his writing, vulnerability, and TikTok recipes.

Your most recent display was a solo booth at artgenève 2023 with Xippas gallery. What did you show?

It was an installation featuring a set of new works. Six photographs in dialogue with two plush cranes, in which “soft heroes” were locked up and had grown up. Everything under the disturbing gaze of Deftones #5 – a velvet canvas, made by the tapestry maker Vladimir Boson, with two large vinyl eyes protruding from it. The installation was like a silvery box in which you can see yourself growing up and old.

Silent Boy - Art Genève 2023

Your works and exhibitions usually reference specific incidents of your life. Which one did you recreate here?

For once, this wasn’t a question of retelling a specific romantic encounter or a night spent in a hotel. The installation recalled a lot of things from my past – both through photos, which are my memories, and machines, which are based on a work I made in 2019. I did a lot of introspection in these last 9 months and I didn't feel like creating anything really new. The narratives of being locked in a box and losing at games have something to do with how I view myself, how powerless I feel in relation to my obsessions and addictions and everything that's just bigger than me.

What were the most important turning points in your life and work in recent years?

I married Ziwen* on March 30, 2022, and became clean from all drugs, alcohol, and medication on May 2, 2022. All the rest seems pointless to me. I am living my turning point.

*the lover to whom Liu Le Lann has dedicated several works and exhibitions over the past years.

You work with a lot of different materials in your practice – lots of textiles, but also glass, wood, and found objects. Often, the materials contradict the objects you create. Do they have any particular significance to you? How do you choose which ones to use for a work?

I started working with different materials at different times. Textiles were my entry point into sculpture, as I came from a performance background and they proved an effective way to create forms that played with body language. The blown glass had something in common with the textile sculptures, because it was also an exoskeletal form filled with air. The materials enable me to reproduce things metaphorically, such as skin, saliva, sugar or molten metal. They all have the advantage of being either soft or fragile, and that seems essential to me. When choosing them, I usually try to appeal to body sensations. I ask myself if I want to caress it, lick it, listen to its rustling, et cetera.

Does your work reflect more on yourself or on other people?

Each project starts with an encounter. I have fun telling it like I would in a blog.

So it's an in-between, I tell about my wanderings while paying tribute to others. I like the echo that some people find in my work. Often, they find something of their adolescence, their first love, a childish melancholy, or another sort of candy souvenir. I see a nostalgic pain in their eyes, and I can connect with them through that.

Do you ever see yourself making work that is not closely connected with your identity and personal history?

I’m worried that if I don't keep my most intimate stories just a few steps away from my sculptures, they will gain a certain autonomy. But I fear it’s just always like that. My work is my diary and my experimentation ground to find myself. However, a few projects were detached from it, such as the champagne buckets I made with Anne Minazio in 2021 or the video we shot with Alfredo Aceto last year. These moments are important and necessary so I can then come back to my personal story.

A lot of your exhibitions, like this recent one, are populated by “soft heroes”, and they’re often wearing masks. Why is that?

At first they didn't have any. The art critic Paul Clinton once compared them to "the unlocatable love objects of Dennis Cooper's fiction", because the boys Cooper obsesses over lack any discernible characteristics and refuse to express themselves. So they demand to be represented. Sometimes I use the masks or hoods to bring out eyes on the faces of the soft heroes. This way I feel less afraid of them, and they can haunt me more peacefully.

What qualifies a person to be turned into a “soft hero”?

It’s somewhat historically rooted. You'll have to read 95, the new novel by my friend Philippe Joanny, which was released on February 1st. He speaks about the company of boys who fell during the AIDS epidemic of the 90’s, as if in a war. It's a book full of soft heroes! Long story short, the main criteria for joining the club is vulnerability.

How do your works transform the relationships, memories, and feelings they refer to?

It’s haunted couture, even when I’m not sewing.

It’s a memory duty that I inflict upon myself to keep on living with these people, to avoid forgetting, and perhaps to flee this solitary artist's existence. This puts a certain responsibility on me as well. My friend Olga Rozenblum wrote for one of my exhibitions in Paris, and said that my work is about exposing myself completely without cynicism, but also about taking on risks and responsibility.

Writing is a big part of your practice. What do you think visual art can achieve in telling a story that writing can’t?

When I start writing, I tend to drift into fiction and use a lot of masks to avoid reality. The sculptures re-create these narratives and force me to show more honesty to other people and to myself. They are a way to share these experiences metaphorically by adding some play, and occasionally subversion. They’re also a great way to escape the loneliness that comes with writing. You can invite people to join the party through collaborations, making them write about your work, or simply discussing it with them.

What form does your writing take? Do you ever publish it?

It’s mainly autofiction, l’écriture du moi, but with long drifts into fiction and poetry.

I’ve never published anything properly, but the texts appear in installations or circulate from hand to hand.

Occasionally some are published online. There’s this weird poem I wrote for Alfredo Aceto's exhibition at Fonderia Artistica Battaglia in Milan and also this earlier influential essay that coincides with the birth of the first soft hero. I've talked about blogging before… I'd love to start a blog again to publish this kind of content. It might be my website. I'm thinking about it.

Are you a soft or a hard person?

I am very hard on myself but I strive to be soft on others.

Are you on TikTok?

I often spend my nights there. At the moment I'm learning vegan recipes from a young Taiwanese chef, George Lee aka @chez_jorge. You should try his Liang Pi Noodles recipe, it's insane.

Are there any new trends in how people relate to gender, self, or sex that inspire you?

I taught a couple of workshops this year, which connected me with a younger generation of creatives, and I’m truly impressed by them. Ways have opened up. There are no new trends, just more space, more visibility and more voices. The people in power remain the same though, so it's up to all of us to weaken these structures further and bring down the villains who dominate us. I'm lucky to have a core of friends of different ages and backgrounds who help me to see how things are articulated in our time, what freedoms we gain, which ones we lose, and at what price. I have more fascinating interlocutors now than I did earlier in my life, and obviously this leads to more inspiration. Today I feel more at home than I did 5 years ago.