I Hope Someday You’ll Join Us

We do not enter the future by discovering it, but by imagining it together.

Across Paris, Shanghai, and New York, Nyo Jinyong Lian stages encounters among women who move with deliberate balance, guidance, and mutual reliance. These scenes do not document existing relationships; they propose others — fragile structures of trust rehearsed through gesture, proximity, and shared presence.

Working from diasporic experience and contemporary life, Lian constructs semi-fictional environments where intimacy becomes a form of world-building. Here, trust is not assumed but composed, maintained, and continually renegotiated. Care and vulnerability operate as quiet forms of agency rather than weakness.

Described by the artist as “visual rehearsals for a society that does not yet exist,” the images invite viewers to inhabit a speculative present in which belonging is chosen rather than inherited. Alliances emerge through attention, reciprocity, and the willingness to remain with uncertainty.

The title is both invitation and promise: a community forming not through conformity, but through the courage to imagine otherwise. Rather than depicting the world as it is, the work lingers in the fragile interval where another one might begin.