[{"id":"thomas-liu-le-lann-what-can-i-tell-to-the-inner-thomas","postPreview":"\n
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\n Photo by Angele Matteo <\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n \t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t
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\n Photo by Angele Matteo <\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n \t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t
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\n Photo by Angele Matteo <\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n \t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t
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Thomas Liu Le Lann: What can I tell to the inner Thomas?<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\t

Thomas Liu Le Lann opens about returning to performance with his new work \"Les Puissants\", amplifying a research on softness in sculpture and its connection to identity.<\/p><\/p><\/div><\/div>\t<\/div>\n\t

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\n\t\t\tby<\/span>\n\t\t\t Federica Nicastro<\/span>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\tGeneva\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t<\/div>\n\t

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\n by<\/span> \n Federica Nicastro<\/span> <\/div>\n
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Thomas Liu Le Lann: What can I tell to the inner Thomas?<\/h2>\n \n

Thomas Liu Le Lann opens about returning to performance with his new work \"Les Puissants\", amplifying a research on softness in sculpture and its connection to identity.<\/p><\/p><\/div><\/div> \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n

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Oct 2, 2023 <\/p>

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Photo by Angele Matteo<\/div><\/div>

On the occasion of two new exhibitions, one currently at Centre d'Art Contemporain<\/a> in Gen\u00e8ve and an upcoming show at Vin Vin Gallery<\/a> in Naples at the end of October, Swiss artist Thomas Liu Le Lann opens about turning back again at performing and dancing, after dedicating the last years to sculpture. Part of an extensive research on softness and fragility, a series of plush dummies called soft heroes are the outcomes of falling in love repeatedly. As his work is highly memorial and biographical, it is also a means to sabotage stiffness in sculpture. To liquify it. Whether casted in glass or inflated in textile, the body in Thomas's work never leaves. Everything is questioned through the body. However elusive, a certain weight - material, emotional - gravitates towards the ground, longing for it. Thomas mends the interrupted performative background, leaving sculpture to be a strand of a larger project rather than a passage. In his latest project, Les Puissants,<\/em> a body that falls recounts of the importance of failure, fears, and vulnerability.<\/p><\/div>

Most of your work is the outcome of personal encounters with people. It is often dedicated to lovers by including their names in works and shows. How does your work absorb these encounters?<\/p><\/div>\n

It's a bit of an addictive process I didn't really choose. When I started doing these soft sculptures, it began with my husband being the first one. I felt obliged to include people that even briefly belong to personal memories and adding their names to the works; I think it is a way not to forget them, to make them live with me. To crystallise relationships. I refer to this as \"haunted couture\". They're going to haunt me and my work forever.<\/p><\/div>

I think of limerence, or what happens when you meet someone at sight and a fantastical longing creeps intrusively. Does infatuation play a big role?<\/p><\/div>\n

After stopping with other addictions, drugs, and alcohol, I realised, in fact that the main trouble I have is this! \"D\u00e9pendance affective\", emotional dependence. I go too deep into meeting people and falling in love with them. That tells much about my work. I often end up wanting to dedicate all my work to them. There are people with whom I would love something to happen, but for many reasons I can't, so they remain big crushes. I once had a crush on a guy working in a convenience store just in front of my flat. I was obsessed with him. So, as I didn't know his name, I did an untitled piece for a show about him, and after the show opened, I decided I had to talk to him. But when I entered the shop, I met him close and the fantasy just dropped. He was horrible! But in the end, it's in these encounters I find my motivation to do artworks.<\/p><\/div>

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Photo by Angele Matteo<\/div><\/div>

By funneling relationships, I imagine a sculpture as a filter to a story. Are there boundaries, and which form they take?<\/p><\/div>\n

I always turn to some self-fiction as a means to avoid reality. Sometimes, the limit is physical, technical or material, with the creation of the object itself. When posting these stories down with writing it all gets more intimate, biographical, detailed and emotionally charged. By extracting some elements and inserting them into the physical world, they become more remote; they are artefacts, objects that belong to everyone.<\/p><\/div>

So writing has a generative role in the process of making sculptures?<\/p><\/div>\n

You know, I always wanted to be an artist, even if I wasn't really able to learn drawing or anything is usually related to being an artist in a classical sense. With writing, it started very early, but I felt so shy about it. Showing my texts means a high level of vulnerability for me. Processing a work from a text was so much easier: I'm able to recall the original story, but a piece of fiction goes through, before being shared with people. Now, I write for others so I can use aspects of my life and mask them for other people.<\/p><\/div>

In this process of erosion of the autobiographical with fiction, what remains a scrap?<\/p><\/div>\n

Sometimes, it is only censorship! It deals with courage and vulnerability a lot. You can't tell the things how they are, so you have to switch to fictional scenes or sweeten them up. To be seductive, you know? I'm now reconnecting with body practice and feeling much more courageous and vulnerable in what I'm doing right now than in all these sculptures I did in the past five years.<\/p><\/div>

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Photo by Angele Matteo<\/div><\/div>

With performance you're getting closer to this?<\/p><\/div>\n

I will tell you what I told my psychologist: It was five years of escaping who I am. By re-engaging with dance and performance, I feel more connected to myself and my body. At the beginning of my art studies, I collaborated with choreographers and created a dance collective with whom I presented pieces in theatres. When I moved to Geneva for HEAD, I broke up with my body. Literally. I gained 15 kilos, did parties and drugs. At that moment, I was approaching sculpture for the first time, and it happened I was deeply in love with my husband as well. He became my first soft hero, a series of sculptures that started around 2018. It was a way for me to switch from body practice to object-making by still including body language. I stuck to this research until one year ago, when I took a break and changed my lifestyle completely. I was really unable to produce anything new. Now, I'm getting to it through a different approach, and I'm working with a choreographer again after so long for a new project. I changed and asked myself, \"What can I tell the inner Thomas?\".<\/p><\/div>

You began with a performative practice, and you're returning to the body after some years dedicated to sculpture. I can't help but notice that the body never leaves: even with sculpture, the material is able to recall tactility. And tactility lures desirability. I think of the candies sculptures and their immediate association with taste and tact. Sugar and saliva. Staying in between a certain innocence of shapes and a sensuality of materials. It is a very playful and ironic turn.<\/p><\/div>\n

When I think of objects, I question them through the body: Is it wet? Is it dry? Is it soft? Is it rough? Can I lick it? Can I touch it? Does it recall a certain type of skin I already touched? For example, in the process of making the lollipops, I added bubbles to the glass to recall the sugar and some white-striped details to recall a milky substance. I started using towel clothes, vinyl, PVC plastics and things like that to evoke a wet skin sensation. It makes me think of sex.<\/p><\/div>

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Photo by Angele Matteo<\/div><\/div>

I noticed a certain attraction to some images. Human traits mostly. The mouth is repeated in many works, or the Deftones<\/em> series (2022); some abstract circular shapes recall a pair of eyes\u2026<\/p><\/div>\n

They come from something I'm not sure I should say to you (laugh). Once, I spent a night with a guy in Hong Kong. At the end of sex, I started to see cum traces on his belly, forming eyes looking at me. I did some drawings which stayed in my backpack for years, until once I was trying to work with this craftsman in Lausanne, and I wanted to make something out of it, so they became work. It's funny.<\/p><\/div>

You have two exhibitions coming. What would you like to anticipate?<\/p><\/div>\n

After one year of break, it's only new works. I'm showing a video at Centre d'art Contemporaine in Geneva this September. In a lake setting, I wear a fencing costume while falling, dancing and swimming in the water. A baroque flute solo is played by a friend. It is screened on an eight-meter-long screen, placed with another work inside the space, a blown glass sculpture of a pair of box gloves called Les Puissants<\/em>. I found out about Laurent Tailhade, an anarchist French writer from the 19th century who wrote a book called L'escrime et la boxe<\/em>, Fence and Box. It's about how powerful people used these sports as a demonstration of the beauty of men's bodies and how the vocabulary of these practices was transposed into diplomatic or business discussions. This story is pretty funny and obviously, the act of falling in the water and swimming in such an outfit is not trivial, it's a sort of failure. There's something about liquid bodies in all those elements that connects with my practice of soft sculpture and glassmaking. The whole concept of fragility is traceable in the movements of the body as much as in the material of glass chosen for the sculpture.<\/p><\/div>

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Photo by Angele Matteo<\/div><\/div>

When I think of your previous \"soft heroes\" sculptures, these sketchy plush figures lay passively, without agency. The term itself questions identity in relation to masculinity, and liquidity is of course very connected to queerness\u2026<\/p><\/div>\n

Since I was a child, masculinity frightens me a lot. That's why I wanted to make this ode to fragility. It's not that masculinity and fragility are not related if you see. It's about the pressure on men to behave in a certain way. The term soft heroes was used by an English writer to describe this part of my production. I loved it and I stuck to it, also because it referenced Donna Haraway's idea that we don't need heroes anymore, that is the very last thing we need today. I think about it every day.<\/p><\/div>

And how this ode to fragility happens in sculpture?<\/p><\/div>\n

Softness has a whole history in art as much as in dancing and fashion. I think of Claes Oldenburg in New York and Yayoi Kusama in Tokyo in the 60s. So many artists did that in so many ways, as minimal artist Eva Hesse. A quote from Claus Oldenburg's writings tells that we switched from representing the body of a soldier to representing the body of a junkie. This is pretty important in my practice, as it has been for lots of artists. First, I came to soft sculptures because sewing is easy to learn and it's a good way to play with body language. But when I started to contextualize the motifs behind its beginnings in art history, I realized how much it is related to sexual liberation and other types of bodies. I thought I had discovered the coolest thing on earth.<\/p>

As a teenager, I was a big fan of Cosima von Bonin; she's a master of soft sculpture. There is a talk I listened to by Diedrich Diederichsen on Cosima von Bonin's work, which shows a video by documentarist Jean Painlev\u00e9 on an octopus in the ocean, a very beautiful cinematic work. In the talk, Diederichsen makes a link between animals that have no spine and sculptures that have no spine. It changes your mind about body, power, and passivity. I recently did a workshop called \"Soft Sculpture\/Haunted Couture\/Weak Agency\". And when I teach, I always start by showing this video by Jean Painlev\u00e9.<\/p><\/div>

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Photo by Angele Matteo<\/div><\/div>

A saying defines a man with no spine in a very common negative sense. Beyond this polarisation, what can be said? What potentialities are spilling from softness and passivity?<\/p><\/div>\n

Getting rid of bulky forms and techniques in art carries a strong political message and liberates us too. I think the exhausted, nonchalant and somewhat disillusioned attitude of my soft heroes is a fair expression of this. I see my body and those of my fellow human beings through them, tired of being objectified perhaps. Oldenburg also said that he was for the art that breaks when one steps on frozen mud (Claes Oldenburg, Store Days<\/em>, 1961). It's a beautiful thought: art is always best performed closest to the ground.<\/p><\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

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Hanna Ku\u010dera: Shifting Positions, or: As if we Already Went Through the Apocalypse<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\t

The artistic practice of Vienna-based artist Hanna Ku\u010dera navigates the fine line between play and work, fiction and reality, professionalism and parody. Through her evolving \u2018para-play,\u2019 she stages Positions that reflect on the pressures of artistic professionalization, the liberating potential of play, and the paradox of moving forward while feeling stuck.<\/p><\/p><\/div><\/div>\t<\/div>\n\t

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Valentina Triet: On Models and Patterns<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\t

In the context of her show at Kunsthalle Winterthur Valentina Triet reflects on structures of orientation as recurring motif in her recent video series.<\/p><\/p><\/div><\/div>\t<\/div>\n\t

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