Nyo Jinyong Lian
Photography as Social Rehearsal.
Nyo Jinyong Lian is a Chinese artist and photographer based in Paris. Working across photography and moving image, she constructs visual allegories through the body and symbolic performance, rehearsing relationships and social orders yet to take shape, and worlds that do not yet exist.
Through fiction, performance, and carefully choreographed collaboration, Lian explores how trust, power, and collective belief shape the ways we inhabit the world. Rather than documenting reality, she creates visual allegories governed by their own internal logic, where games, rituals, and everyday gestures become tools for reimagining how we might live together. Moving between tenderness and unease, intimacy and absurdity, her images capture threshold moments when existing orders begin to loosen and other possibilities are still taking form.
In Lian’s images, bodies are never still: they pull, float, separate, support, and balance one another. These shifting forces form temporary sculptures charged with suspense, holding relationships between formation and collapse while propelling movement toward the infinite possibilities of the next moment.
Inspired by The Emperor’s New Clothes, her ongoing project Trust Me examines the invisible agreements that sustain social life and the fragile systems that exist only through collective belief. In her practice, photography is not simply a medium for representing reality, but a space for social rehearsal—a place where people can collectively imagine, test, and rehearse other ways of relating to one another and living together before they become reality.
Lian’s work has been exhibited internationally at Paris Photo, Athens Photo Festival, Houston Center for Photography, Fisheye Gallery during Les Rencontres d’Arles, Sigg Art Foundation, Casa Conti, InCadaqués Photo Festival, and PhotoSaintGermain in Paris.
In 2026, she was selected for the Prix Étudiants Paris Photo and the Les Filles de la Photo × Maje Patronage Program, and her work appeared on the cover of France’s Fisheye Magazine. In 2025, she received the 212 Photography Istanbul Grand Prize and the Les Agents Associés – Jeunes Talents Prize, and her work appeared on the cover of Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin. Her artist book, Trust Me, was also shortlisted for the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson Self-Published Photobook Award.
Lian lives and works in Paris.
Exhibitions, collaborations & print inquiries:
lianjinyong.paris@gmail.com
Commission inquiries:
made@eyemade.com
Through fiction, performance, and carefully choreographed collaboration, Lian explores how trust, power, and collective belief shape the ways we inhabit the world. Rather than documenting reality, she creates visual allegories governed by their own internal logic, where games, rituals, and everyday gestures become tools for reimagining how we might live together. Moving between tenderness and unease, intimacy and absurdity, her images capture threshold moments when existing orders begin to loosen and other possibilities are still taking form.
In Lian’s images, bodies are never still: they pull, float, separate, support, and balance one another. These shifting forces form temporary sculptures charged with suspense, holding relationships between formation and collapse while propelling movement toward the infinite possibilities of the next moment.
Inspired by The Emperor’s New Clothes, her ongoing project Trust Me examines the invisible agreements that sustain social life and the fragile systems that exist only through collective belief. In her practice, photography is not simply a medium for representing reality, but a space for social rehearsal—a place where people can collectively imagine, test, and rehearse other ways of relating to one another and living together before they become reality.
Lian’s work has been exhibited internationally at Paris Photo, Athens Photo Festival, Houston Center for Photography, Fisheye Gallery during Les Rencontres d’Arles, Sigg Art Foundation, Casa Conti, InCadaqués Photo Festival, and PhotoSaintGermain in Paris.
In 2026, she was selected for the Prix Étudiants Paris Photo and the Les Filles de la Photo × Maje Patronage Program, and her work appeared on the cover of France’s Fisheye Magazine. In 2025, she received the 212 Photography Istanbul Grand Prize and the Les Agents Associés – Jeunes Talents Prize, and her work appeared on the cover of Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin. Her artist book, Trust Me, was also shortlisted for the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson Self-Published Photobook Award.
Lian lives and works in Paris.
Exhibitions, collaborations & print inquiries:
lianjinyong.paris@gmail.com
Commission inquiries:
made@eyemade.com