in each other's /BECOMING/ otherwise

Concept by Chang Liu (Leo) & Jonathan Starr

Ongoing project started in July, 2025

Research Support and Location: 

Concept:

in each other's /becoming/ otherwise is a performance art and image-based collaboration by Chang Liu (Leo) and Jonathan Starr that explores the radical intimacy of mutual gaze, identity projection, and transformation across bodies, cultures, and imaginations.

Two naked queer bodies — one Han Chinese, one White British — sit face to face on a mattress. A shadow, a mirror, a gaze. Through stillness and looking, the work becomes a site of exchange: of decisions made for each other, of projected selves, of speculative identities. Layer by layer, the artists reconstruct one another — digitally, somatically, symbolically — across a series of image-based transformations and performative experiments.

This project asks:

• What do we really see when we look at one another?

• What can we become in each other's reality, desire, and imagination?

• What happens when the act of seeing is an act of becoming otherwise?

The work unfolds as a shifting constellation of images, gestures, and interventions — blurring boundaries between self and other, here and there, now and then, mirror and shadow, fiction and flesh, reality and surreality.