"Love Objects" traces the contours of the body as it is transformed through love—made luminous, raw, exposed, and occasionally undone. The exhibition brings together contemporary works by Luo Yang, Lin Zhipeng, Gulu, and Melissa Steckbauer that approach the nude not as a study in form, but as an unfolding relation—a site where intimacy, desire, and vulnerability converge.
The nude in these works is not simply seen, but felt. These are bodies caught in the act of offering themselves—sometimes to another, sometimes to the gaze, sometimes to the possibility of being altered by love. In this sense, the exhibition draws upon an idea of love not as possession or narrative, but as an event: something that happens between bodies, reshaping them in the process.
Love here is both anchor and fracture. It dissolves the edges of selfhood, calling forth what Roland Barthes once described as the "adoring subject," suspended in the tension between longing and loss. Some works revel in that dissolution—flesh merging with flesh in mutual becoming—while others hold space for the gaps and silences love creates, the tender ache of absence that intimacy can also reveal.
Online, these bodies arrive without the warmth of proximity, but not without presence. Mediated through the screen, the images heighten the distance between viewer and subject even as they invite closeness. This paradox is central to the exhibition’s form: desire thrives in distance, and love often arises in the interval where bodies cannot fully meet.
What emerges is not a celebration of idealized romance, but a meditation on the erotics of relation. Here, love is made visible in gestures—a turned back, an open hand, a slackened mouth—and in the quiet audacity of exposure. These are not simply naked bodies; they are bodies made available to love’s unfolding, to its risks and revelations.
