Pixy Liao and Liu Hsing-Yu at Oslo Negativ by SKOG x Vasli Souza
For Oslo’s Photo Festival, Oslo Negativ 2026, SKOG and Fotogalleri Vasli Souza come together to present two photographers who turn the camera towards what is closest to them.
Pixy Liao and Liu Hsing-Yu look at love, intimacy and relationships from deeply personal and unconventional angles. Both work with the near and the familiar. Through staging, role reversal and humour, they show how complex it is to relate to one another.
Their images move between tenderness and discomfort, intimacy and performance, the everyday and the unexpected. Love, family, desire and the roles we inhabit are seen up close. What feels familiar is turned around.
The exhibition offers no fixed answers. It invites us into two personal worlds, where the intimate becomes strange, and what draws us together can also unsettle us.
Pixy Liao 廖逸君
For Pixy Liao, the photograph is a place where intimacy can be questioned, rehearsed and reinvented. She does not document love and desire. She examines the invisible structures that shape how we understand them.
Her scenes are carefully constructed. Bodies, gestures and domestic spaces become stages where power shifts and expectations are reversed.
By placing herself and those close to her in these situations, Liao blurs the line between reality and performance. Humour opens the door, letting vulnerability and confrontation share the same frame. The results can be tender, funny, awkward or unsettling. Often all at once.
Her photographs are intimate, but never passive. Who looks? Who is looked at? Who holds the power? And what happens when we refuse the roles we have been given? In Liao’s world, love is not fixed. It is negotiated between bodies, desires and identities. Tenderness can become resistance.
Liu Hsing-Yu 劉星佑
Liu Hsing-Yu uses photography to stay with what is hard to name. His images come from the quiet spaces of intimacy: between family members, between memory and the present, between what is seen and what is felt.
His photographs hold a particular stillness. Ordinary gestures, familiar rooms and passing encounters are suspended, as if the camera lets a moment last a little longer before it disappears. Beneath the calm surface, something shifts. The familiar grows uncertain. The everyday carries traces of memory, longing and distance.
Liu does not explain the relationships he pictures. He leaves room for ambiguity, for emotions that cannot be fully put into words. His work reminds us that intimacy is not only found in closeness. It also lives in the spaces between people: in silence, absence, memory and the quiet recognition of another.
