Chang Liu (刘畅 / 劉暢), also known as Leo, is a queer Asian artist working across choreography, performance art, screendance, and artistic research. Born in Wuhan, China and now based in Stockholm, Sweden, Leo’s work explores identity, embodiment, cultural memory, and the subtle intersections between personal narrative and broader historical and political realities.

 

Leo’s practice grows from Chinese storytelling traditions, auto-ethnography, and epitaph as performative artistic gestures. Their work inhabits shifting thresholds—between art and life, self and other, presence and absence—where the body becomes a site for negotiating how history, culture, and identity are continuously constructed and transformed.

 

At the center of Leo’s practice is what they describe as Queer Sinic Embodiment. Through this approach, Chinese bodily traditions, gestures, myths, and philosophical ideas are revisited through queer, diasporic, and contemporary performative perspectives. Trained in Chinese classical dance (performance) in China, modern dance (choreography) in the United States, and contemporary dance (performativity) practice in Europe, Leo’s body carries a transnational archive of movement knowledge. Within their work, the body functions not only as medium but also as method—an embodied field where cultural memory, philosophical thought, and lived experience encounter one another.

 

A guiding principle in Leo’s artistic thinking is the classical Chinese idea 借古讽今—borrowing the past to reflect on the present. Rather than treating historical materials as fixed heritage, Leo approaches ancient texts, gestures, and bodily practices as living resources through which contemporary questions can be explored. In this sense, the past is not preserved as history but activated as a method for thinking the present.

 

In recent years Leo’s research has increasingly turned toward classical Chinese philosophy, poetry, and historical writings as primary sources of artistic thinking. Instead of positioning contemporary Western theoretical frameworks as the starting point of research, Leo studies ancient texts directly and allows them to inform artistic processes and embodied experimentation. Through this approach, Leo seeks to decolonize artistic thinking through classical Chinese sources, allowing philosophical systems outside dominant academic traditions to shape the conceptual language of contemporary performance practice.

 

Across dance, film, and performance art, Leo approaches documentation not merely as a form of record but as a creative methodology. Filmmaking, photographing, editing, and archiving become choreographic tools that shape how movement is perceived and remembered. This process unfolds through what Leo describes as “documenting the undocumented and re-documenting the documented,” where artistic actions generate new layers of interpretation rather than fixed conclusions.

 

Recent research draws from historical visual materials such as Daoyin Tu (导引图)—a silk chart discovered in the Mawangdui tombs (168 BCE), often considered one of the earliest visual representations of bodily practice. Leo approaches such diagrams not as historical exercises but as open choreographic scores, translating visual knowledge of the body into contemporary movement, sound, and documentation.

 

Leo’s works often inhabit liminal territories—between visibility and invisibility, metaphysics and physics, tradition and speculation. Within these spaces, choreography becomes a way of thinking through the body, where every performed gesture remains open to reinterpretation.

 

Through this practice, Leo approaches the body as a living and unfinished archive, where past knowledge, present experience, and future possibilities continuously encounter one another.