Observing the Body

Artist’s project statement

Action period: ongoing since 20 September 2026.

For many years, I have used my body to intervene in social realities, connecting artistic practice with public life and civic action. As I continued to attend to the world outside, a question gradually became concrete: how might those reflections on the human condition, freedom and responsibility return to my own life?

In mid-September 2026, changes in my physical condition and weight led me to decide to lose weight and to make this action an art project focused on myself. I began on 20 September, at a starting weight of 208 pounds, approximately 94.3 kilograms. Improving my health is the immediate need behind the action and the practical basis from which the work arises.

The body carries the accumulation of life. Work rhythms, eating habits, emotions, age and the social environment all participate in bodily change in different ways. Losing weight gives me an opportunity to begin with myself and observe these relationships anew: which habits can change, which constraints arise from living conditions, and which behaviors described as personal choices have already been shaped by the surrounding environment?

In the project, I will weigh myself and take photographs at set times, continually recording food, activity, rest and bodily sensations. I will retain hunger, fatigue, desire, hesitation and repetition, and record how these experiences change my understanding of everyday life and social questions. The photographs remain truthful, without retouching to heighten change; the writing begins with particular experiences, without requiring each day to yield a conclusion.

The process of losing weight also brings me face to face with the relationship between my own behavior and my longstanding concerns. How does an artist concerned with social issues organize his life and treat his own body? When I try to change my habits, what negotiations arise between personal will and actual conditions? The body is both the subject of action and the bearer of its consequences.

Through an online archive and presentations at different stages, I will bring this private practice back into public discussion, making bodily changes and the lived experiences behind them visible together and connecting them with other people’s experiences.

The project does not take a particular number as its sole endpoint. Weight loss, a plateau or an increase, as well as life after reaching a provisional goal, all belong to the work’s process. From the day it begins, the action continually produces experience; its outcome remains open.

Observing the Body also resonates with my 2013 performance Sunbathing (39.998595, 16.507515) · Anthropometry, continuing an attention to the body and its environment and extending bodily measurement and observation into an ongoing everyday practice. Bodily changes gradually reveal the relationship between individual life and social conditions. They also return my thinking about bodily intervention in society to myself: how do we live, and under what conditions can we change our lives?

—Liu Qiming, 16 September 2026.