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When my girlfriend and I returned to her Ukrainian Village apartment after seeing Pixy Liao’s immersive exhibition, “Relationship Material,” at the Art Institute of Chicago last year, the last thing I expected was to find the subversive Chinese portrait photographer shooting her next show down the block from us, in the gaudy time capsule Airbnb of legendary local mobster Joey “The Clown” Lombardo. That show, “Always Keep an Eye on the One You Love,” which opened this spring, at Florit/Florit in Palma de Mallorca, (just as Liao received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for her firm control behind the lens) presented a series of self-portraits fixed on Liao and her longtime muse, model, and partner, Moro, who she directed around Lombardo’s home in ways sure to roil the tough guy’s spirit: Kneeling at Liao’s side in the living room, alongside a life-sized ceramic lion sporting the same posture; on his knees again, now more supplicant than pet, his head confined beneath the hem of her skirt which, blending into his shirt, disappears him entirely; in the bedroom, standing atop the nightstand dressed in pink briefs. Pinned back against the fading madras wallpaper, he’s suffering corner time on full display, a lamp at his feet highlighting his knobby knees, and a chandelier close to his head, denying him the refuge of shadows. The harsh light calls to mind mug shot, interrogation, and crime scene flash all at once.
“Sometimes I treat him like a model, sometimes I treat him like a prop,” Liao says about the obvious power dynamic that’s been on display for the past 18 years in a body of work which challenges viewers to ask, if they’re uncomfortable with Moro’s docility in the face of Liao’s uncompromising authority, why aren’t they more uncomfortable when they witness traditional male and female roles as they are in everyday life?
And in fact, Liao treated Moro worse in the beginning. Before she saw his potential as her boyfriend, she saw his potential as a corpse.
“I have a fascination with crime scenes,” Liao says, citing one of her favorite books, Crime Album Stories: Paris 1886-1902, which features dozens of uncensored images from police reports, including a suitcase containing a torso found in the Seine.
“Before I started [my project with Moro], I was working on a crime scene project with Moro. For one photo, I asked him, ‘do you want to play a body in my suitcase?’ And he just got naked and played dead” Liao says. “I took the picture and showed my class, and my teacher, my classmates, paused, hesitated, then asked, ‘are you treating Moro okay?’ I never thought anybody would ever think that.”
It was in that moment when she realized there was something special about Moro’s willingness to go to extremes to model for her. “And I could use that to take photos of us to try to explain our relationship,” she surmised. Their overarching project, “Experimental Relationship,” has been ongoing now for 18 years, playing out around the world from the prestigious photo fair Rencontres d’Arles in the south of France to the Fotografiska photography museums dotted across northern Europe, and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong.
The couple met while Liao was pursuing an MFA in photography at the University of Memphis, before they relocated to Manhattan. One of their earliest dates took place at a local laundromat, an experience documented in the song, Italo, by PIMO [Pixy + Moro] the couple’s dreampop band, where Moro takes the creative lead in defining their partnership through everything from lyrics to video direction. Moro seldom speaks publicly about Liao’s work, but his songs give some insight into his agency, like in how he reveals how he’s allowing himself to be used by Liao, but on his own terms. Sample lyrics: (Moro) You asked me for the change / (Pixy) Oh, I don’t need your number, just coins.
“Always Keep an Eye on the One You Love” shows Liao and Moro both in tension and harmony. One series of images, shot at Lombardo’s former home, sees Moro at his most humble: in House-Husband’s Weapons (2025) his squinting eyes are fixed with out-of-character tough guy swagger as he sits deep in a leather armchair like he’s Tony Montana in Scarface, but he’s betrayed by his armaments–a fluffy duster and a spray bottle of Shout! stain remover. A second contrasting series shows the couple at a cabin in upstate Beacon, New York. Here they’re in greater harmony, basking in stripped interiors, neutral undies, and summer light, Liao languorously draped atop her partner like a cotton throw, or gently pinning him, on the bed, or in the kitchen, as if he might otherwise be carried away by a gentle breeze.
Liao’s happy to strip a hotel room down to a bare white cube for her art, as she did in her “Bed Wrestling” series, which saw her turn the window-framed mattress in a CitizenM hotel room into a wrestling mat, where she grappled with Moro in contrasting unitards until, much like in WWE, the match ended in a predetermined outcome he had no chance of escaping: Moro prostrate, Liao victorious as lover and fighter. But more often Liao seeks to channel the soul of a lived environment, and in the title photo, Always Keep an Eye on the One You Love (2025), Liao embodies Lombardo, who earned his clown moniker after he left a federal courthouse staring down the press through a gutted copy of that morning’s Chicago Sun-Times. In her homage, Liao shows she can be every bit as foreboding as a man who bribed state senators and skimmed $2 million from the Stardust Casino in Las Vegas back in the day; but here it’s Moro on trial. Liao holds up the cut-out tabloid at the kitchen table while he prepares himself a cup of tea. He doesn’t meet her gaze in the mirrored backsplash but it’s clear he can’t escape being objectified for her pleasure, unless he wants to sleep in the basement too.
“Sometimes I find myself wanting to do something I’m not supposed to do, and if I can do it in a photo, that’s kind of like getting to do it, and that’s the fun part of my work.” Liao says, noting most of the taboos on display in their series are strictly performative. One exception is a series of soft pink penis sculptures she once assigned him to craft off-camera. There’s no denying the time and effort Moro put into the works, which Liao claimed as her own, represented Moro at his most organically submissive.
“In a relationship, people are not always equal, and you get benefits from your spouse or your partner. There are many free services you can request–for him to model for you, sew for you, cook for you. But that’s also just what people get in being in an intimate relationship, and I’m interested in the question to what extent can you use that?”
But unlike most lived-in power dynamics, a long day of shooting doesn’t end with Liao coaxing Moro out of subspace. “It’s more difficult to start up a photo shoot. I get very tense, and I need to make sure everything is set, that he’s physically and mentally ready, and then it’s the rush of working, but afterward we both relax right away, and take a nap.”