
2025.05.25 Sunday 16:00
Location
MACA Art Center, 706 Beiyi St, 798 Art Zone, No.2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing
Artists: Liao Wen, Wang Xuanqi, Pan Xiaonan, Anita Pan

MACA Art Center and Eclosion Collection + Projects will co-present Axis, a performance extending from the exhibition Liao Wen: Trust Fall,on the afternoon of May 25th during Gallery Weekend Beijing .
In Trust Fall, Liao Wen explores the liminal states of the body and the complex relationships between individuals and social systems through site-specific installations. The performance Axis is a collaborative work by artist Liao Wen, performers Wang Xuanqi and Pan Xiaonan, and sound artist Anita Pan. Emerging from the exhibition setting, Axis transforms the interactive installation into a dynamic site of bodily movement.
"Axis" exists across multiple dimensions: the body pivots around joints in repetitive motion; daily commutes revolve around transportation routes, shaping our lives; ways of thinking follows hidden coordinates, oscillating between the habitual and the deviant.
Axis unfolds in three parts, depicting moments of friction and fusion between the self and others. Like bodies moving clockwise and counterclockwise, they collide, resist, pull, and entangle—generating flows of force while continuously breaking down and reassembling perceptions and reactions within shifting fields of energy. As the space fills with footsteps, focal points dissolve into the crowd; individual bodies overlap with the trajectories of others, merging into the axis of the everyday.
Combining installation, sound, and bodily action, Axis orchestrates an encounter of rhythm and energy within space. When different axes intersect, does the pivot shift? How does the body respond amid the tensions of collision and collapse, contact and separation?
Liao Wen lives and works in Hong Kong. She received her MFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2019. Liao Wen's practice spans sculpture, performance, and video. Drawing inspiration from puppetry, anthropology of myths and rituals, medicine, and art history, she interrogates the social order, technology, and disciplining power projected onto the body. Both primordial and futuristic, her works depict the unsettling balance of the body in the liminal state and imagine future bodily possibilities. She has held solo exhibitions at Capsule Shanghai (Venice, 2024; Shanghai, 2021) and Cai Jin Space (Beijing, 2021). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou, 2024); The First Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial (Guangzhou, 2023); Cassina Projects (Milan, 2023); François Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles, 2022); OCAT Biennale 2021 (Shenzhen, 2021), among others. She was awarded the Frieze New York Stand prize in 2023 and was a finalist artist for the Ducato Prize in 2023. Her works have been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Art in America, The Art Newspaper China, and ArtReview. She has been selected to be the resident of Pro Helvetia in Switzerland in 2025.
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Wang Xuanqi is a Beijing-based creator and performer whose practice focuses on movement, employing the body as a conduit to engage with living experience. In 2016, she co-founded the performance collective Untitled Group with Gu Jiani. Rooted in physical experimentation, Untitled Group's works explore bodily language through the practice of "force," revealing subtle interrelationships between individuals and their environments. (Works includeMorphing,Transition, Pins, and Right & Left.) In 2021, Wang and Gu initiated Crossing Project, in which Wang serves as co-founder, facilitator, and writer. This project creates an open platform that extends Untitled Group's kinetic research through thematic workshops, inviting artists and practitioners to share cross-disciplinary creative processes with the public. As a key organizer of Beijing's contact improvisation community, Wang has established Thursday Afternoon Lab Collective that investigates experimental and communal possibilities through dance improvisation, somatic philosophy, and research-based performance. Wang embarked on solo creation in 2022, and her first independent work How to land was premiered in August 2023. In 2025, she founded the experimental space "Grassland" to cultivate new possibilities for artistic collaboration and creation.
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Pan Xiaonan has been organizing the dance platform "Last Dance" since 2016. She enjoys performing in public spaces outside of traditional theaters. In recent years, she works as a choreographer to present her observations of life.
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Anita Pan is an artist and writer whose practice primarily engages with sound, text, performance, and installation. She holds a Master of Philosophy in Literature from Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society in the Netherlands. Her work expands from her background in literary studies and vocal training, taking methods such as note-taking, sampling, translation, and improvisation to explore the possibilities of writing and singing across different mediums. She currently lives and works in Beijing.

Eclosion Collection + Projects commenced as a systematic study of a transnational contemporary art collection, dedicated to exploring the possibilities and social responsibilities of private collection within the public domain through "conscious collecting." It has since evolved into a versatile and generative space for archiving, research, exhibitions, and salon workshops, building an inclusive platform of creative freedom and vibrant exchange for the local community.
