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print this pageAcross the Long Season: Image-making as Labor, Resistance and Reclamation
Jiayi Liang
Friday, March 20 - 3:00PM to 3:30PM
Atlanta 1
The Long Season is a lens-based project that explores the landscape as both a physical terrain and a constructed ideological space, particularly through the lens of East Asian female identity. Blending photography with sculptural paper cutouts, I use my own body—fragmented and faceless—as a recurring motif to examine how patriarchal systems have historically objectified, erased, and silenced Asian women. Drawing from both Western landscapes and intimate, constructed dioramas, this work reflects on the ongoing impact of colonial narratives, cultural stereotypes, and generational trauma.
Paper becomes a central material in this process—not only for its fragility, but for its potential to hold, tear, and be remade. By transferring my body into this surface, omitting the face, and recalling the aesthetic of fetishized China dolls, I reclaim authorship over my image and push back against modes of visibility rooted in orientalism. Cutting becomes both an act of violence and an act of care—a way to simultaneously deconstruct imposed narratives and rebuild alternative spaces of belonging.
The images function as resistance: gestures of quiet rebellion, labor-intensive reconstructions of identity, and meditations on the cyclical nature of trauma. My work invites viewers to consider how bodies carry the weight of history and how visual strategies can reclaim power through fragmentation, repetition, and reassembly. The Long Season reclaims visual language as a transformative tool, creating a new mythos of agency, rupture, and reimagined presence.
speaker
Jiayi Liang
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