Jinyong Lian

Image from “Trust Me” project by Jinyong Lian

Biography

Website: http://jinyonglian.cargo.site

Instagram: @lianjinyong

Jinyong Lian is a Chinese visual artist based in Paris, originally from Shenzhen. Through carefully constructed scenes conceived as performative situations and gestures, she explores the psychological tensions that emerge at the boundary between personal reality and fiction. Her work takes the form of "visual fables," often depicting moments of transition in which everything seems on the verge of change. Infused with humour and a sense of the uncanny, her images invite viewers to see the world differently, as if it were a theatre unfolding within oneself.

The project

Trust Me is a cycle of staged photographic fables that examines how invisible systems of power inhabit intimacy, behavior, and perception. Working from a diasporic position across China, France, and the United States, Lian constructs semi-fictional environments in which controlled gestures, mirrored actions, and suspended movements expose trust as something negotiated rather than given. Domestic objects and everyday routines are transformed into psychological devices — sites of tension, restraint, and quiet entrapment — revealing how social order enters the body as fatigue, vigilance, or alienation. Drawing on the uncanny and the absurd, the work treats photography not as documentation but as a method of detection, tracing the emotional architecture through which belief, fear, and authority are rehearsed in daily life. Described by the artist as a “visual investigation,” Trust Me maps a portrait of contemporary anxiety while questioning the medium’s role in a post-truth visual culture.

Image from “Trust Me” project by Jinyong Lian

Image from “Trust Me” project by Jinyong Lian