I Hope Someday You’ll Join Us

We do not enter the future by discovering it, but by imagining it together. Across Paris, Shanghai, and New York, Lian stages encounters among women who move with balance, guidance, and mutual reliance. These scenes do not document existing relationships—they propose fragile structures of trust rehearsed through gesture, proximity, and shared presence. Drawing on diasporic experience and feminist genealogies, Lian constructs semi-fictional environments where intimacy becomes a form of world-building. These images function as contemporary fables—stories shaped by uncertainty, yet driven by a shared desire to move forward together. Care and vulnerability operate as quiet forms of agency rather than weakness, inviting viewers to inhabit a speculative present where belonging is chosen, not inherited. Described by the artist as “visual rehearsals for a society that does not yet exist,” the work lingers in the fragile interval where another world might begin. It maps emergent forms of femininity, relational politics, and performative trust—where intimacy becomes both a structure and a possibility.