Chang Liu (刘畅 / 劉暢), also known as Leo, is a queer Asian artist whose work flows between dance, screendance, performance art, and interdisciplinary research. Born in Wuhan, China (1990) and now based in Stockholm, Sweden, Leo’s practice delves into identity, queerness, Asianness, selfhood, cultural history, auto-ethnography, and the intersections of personal narrative with broader sociopolitical landscapes.

Their artistic research moves across shifting thresholds—why art and life blur and oppose, when the human being and artistic being intertwine and dissolve, where selfness and otherness integrate and segregate, and how east and west refract each other through both perception and misperception.

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In dance, Leo’s practice merges the precision of Chinese classical and Asian folk forms, the grounded power and calmness of martial arts, and the fluid experimentation of contemporary movement. Trained across China, the U.S., and Europe, their body carries a transnational archive—gestures shaped by cultural history yet reimagined through queer embodiment. Rooted in Taoist philosophy, their movement inhabits wu wei (无为 / 無為)—an effortless action that listens to time, space, and breath, and echos among Yi (subtle will), Qi  (relational current), Xing (embodied archive). In performance, tradition and experimentation, heritage and nowness flow as one, creating a dance language that is at once personal and political, individual and interactive, intimate and expansive.

 

In screendance, Leo approaches the camera not as a passive recorder but as an active choreographic partner. Movement is reframed, re-edited, and re-seen through shifting lenses—inviting new meanings to emerge from repetition, fragmentation, and juxtaposition. Their films investigate visibility and erasure, intimacy and distance, and the interplay between dance as a human-made form and dance as part of nature. Each work holds the tension between continuity and fragmentality, revealing how dance experience is shaped through the choreographic lens—not only on the human body but also within movement’s relationship to space, time, and environment.

 

In performance art, Leo crosses disciplines—merging action, installation, image, text, video, sound, and participatory encounters. The body exists both as subject and site—exploring identity and history as both archive and living form, and tracing the shifting boundaries between intense connectivity and null detachment. It is also object and place, capable of arranging itself and entering into dialogue with otherness and nothingness, moving between the production and the reduction of entropy, between dreamlike reality and grounded surreality. Within this wandering lies an infinity of enjoyment—a deep, sustaining engagement with the act of performance itself—and an endurance that allows works to stretch, evolve, and breathe over time.

Leo’s works often inhabit liminal spaces: between presence and absence, metaphysics and physics, the seen and the unseen.

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Performances unfold as artistic actions in motion, where every ending is a beginning, and where the act of listing versus contrasting becomes a way to navigate multiple truths. Through documenting documentation and documenting the undocumented, Leo not only preserves a trace of what has occurred but also reopens it to reinterpretation—making the “done” an invitation for the next becoming becasue every done happening is already beginning to happen.