Experimental Relationship by Pixy Liao begun in 2007 in Memphis, Tennessee, and continued in Brooklyn, Japan, Sweden, and elsewhere, staging Liao's intimate and creative partnership with Takahiro "Moro" Morooka. The couple met as international students in 2006, when Liao began photographing the younger Japanese-born musician for University of Memphis assignments. Classmates' unease at scenes treating him as a prop helped her recognize the relationship itself as her subject.
The project examines alternative possibilities for heterosexual partnership, challenging Liao's expectation that an older man should act as protector and mentor. Its exchanges of conventional sexual and power roles ask how gender, age, Chinese-Japanese cultural difference, and social pressure shape intimacy. Rather than presenting female domination as an endpoint, Liao investigates the woman she wants to become and the "new equilibrium" a couple might construct. As the relationship matures, the series also addresses consent, collaboration, time, and growing older together.
Predominantly saturated color photographs place the pair in arranged domestic interiors, public spaces, and travel settings. Liao often appears clothed while Moro is nude, positioned above him or looking down; elsewhere, cross-dressing, food, beds, touch, and exchanged bodily substances complicate fixed roles. Full-body tableaux and tighter framings create moods that move among play, tenderness, erotic tension, and unease.
Liao uses a Zenza Bronica ETR medium-format camera acquired in graduate school. She plans locations, clothing, and poses in notebooks, while leaving Moro room to improvise gestures and expressions during shoots that usually last 30 to 60 minutes. The visible cable release signals how the image was made: although Liao directs and composes each situation, either partner may trigger the shutter. This shared mechanism mirrors Moro's gradual shift from model to collaborator.
The 2018 photobook received an Aperture/Paris Photo First Photobook Award jury special mention, while the series earned the 2018 Jimei × Arles-Madame Figaro Women Photographers Award. Later presentations included Rencontres d'Arles in 2019; Fotografiska New York, Stockholm, and Tallinn in 2021-22; and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2025.
