Yilun Liu

The exhibition version extends the digital performance into physical space through a restrained yet effective material strategy. Images from the online journey are printed and arranged across three laminated sheets, layered to produce subtle shifts in depth and alignment. As the viewer moves, images partially obscure and reveal one another, echoing the parallax effect of Street View navigation. This translation from screen to object does not attempt to “fix” the digital instability; instead, it preserves and amplifies it. The laminated surfaces act as membranes—neither fully transparent nor opaque – mirroring the ambiguity between presence and projection that defines the project.

Importantly, Liu avoids spectacle. The scale is intimate, the gestures precise. Rather than overwhelming the viewer with technological excess, Paris Archive invites close looking and slow recognition. This restraint reflects Liu’s architectural sensitivity to spatial sequencing and bodily orientation. The viewer does not encounter the work as a static image but as a durational experience, activated through movement, proximity, and perceptual adjustment.

The project’s engagement with social media further complicates its reading. By allowing the fabricated journey to circulate organically among friends and strangers, Liu implicates the audience as unwitting participants. The work unfolds not only in the gallery but within networks of sharing, liking, and commenting – spaces where authenticity is often assumed rather than examined. In this context, Paris Archive functions as a quiet critique of how digital travel imagery constructs aspirational identities and collective fantasies, often detached from physical experience.

Ultimately, Paris Archive is less about Paris than about the conditions under which place is imagined today. Liu does not position herself as a deceiver but as a choreographer of perception, exposing how easily trust is produced through familiar visual languages. The work asks pointed questions: What does it mean to “be” somewhere in an era of remote access? How do digital tools reconfigure memory before it is even formed? And where does authorship reside when experience is assembled from pre-existing data?

Through its elegant synthesis of performance, spatial design, and material translation, Paris Archive affirms Yilun Liu’s position as an artist attuned to the subtle politics of perception. The project lingers not as a revelation but as a destabilization – an invitation to reconsider how we navigate, remember, and believe in the spaces we never quite inhabit.