Artist spotlight : Peishen Liang

ARTIST STATEMENT:

We live in an age of thresholds. Millions of people now live outside the countries in which they were born, while conflict, migration and global mobility continue to reshape how we understand home, distance and belonging. Yet large numbers often conceal what movement feels like at the scale of everyday life: a final embrace, a delayed arrival, a hand raised in farewell.

Threshold is an long term ongoing photographic project documenting the emotional landscape of London's transport hubs, including St Pancras International, King's Cross Station and Heathrow Airport. These spaces are designed for transit rather than intimacy, yet they repeatedly become stages for some of our most private experiences: departures that change lives, reunions that arrive quietly, and moments of waiting that seem to stretch beyond time.

London is one of the world's great cities of migration. Here, people arrive from elsewhere and depart again, carrying with them histories, hopes and absences. In these places, the distance between people is not measured in miles but in gestures — in an embrace held a little longer, in the glance toward an arrivals gate, or in the silence that follows someone already gone.

The project does not seek to categorise movement. People travel for profoundly different reasons: for safety, work, study, family or love. Yet moments of departure and return often reveal a shared vulnerability. At the threshold between leaving and arriving, identities become unsettled, and the ordinary rituals of movement expose something fundamental about human relationships.

Photographed entirely in black and white, Threshold removes the distractions of colour to focus on gesture, posture and the quiet choreography of waiting. The work reflects on what it means to live between places, between identities, and between the life we leave behind and the one not yet fully formed.

Social Networks :

 - Instagram Handle: @jiyiyojio

- Website: https://www.peishenliang.com/

- Portfolio: https://www.peishenliang.com/

Peishen Liang

1. Inspiration & Style
What initially inspired you to become an artist, and how did you develop your unique artistic style?
Answer: I came to the UK alone at sixteen, and that experience of migration is really where my way of seeing began, long before I picked up a camera seriously. Once I was working as a photographer, I kept noticing how rarely migration is shown at human scale — it tends to appear as statistics, or as crisis, rather than as a hand raised in farewell or a child searching a crowd. I wanted my style to slow that down: black and white, stillness over action, gesture over event. The goal was always to make migration visible as something lived, not just reported.

2. Creative Process
Do you have any rituals or routines that help you get into a creative mindset when starting a new project?
Answer: My projects tend to begin without a plan. I notice myself returning to the same kind of place — a station, an airport — long before I understand why. There isn’t really a ritual so much as patience: I spend a lot of time simply standing in these transit spaces, not photographing, just watching how people move through them. The actual photographing happens slowly, often over years rather than weeks. I think the discipline I rely on most is resisting the urge to resolve a project too quickly — letting a body of work tell me what it’s about, rather than deciding in advance.

3. Artistic Influences
How do you balance historical or artistic influences with your personal style, and how do these influences manifest in your work today?
Answer: I look closely at the humanist documentary tradition — photographers who found enormous emotional weight in ordinary public spaces rather than staged drama. But I try not to let influence become imitation. What I keep from that tradition is the belief that a quiet, unremarkable moment can carry as much meaning as a dramatic one, if you wait long enough and look closely enough. Where I depart from it is in my own position: I am not an outside observer of migration, I have lived inside that experience, and I think that changes what I choose to notice and how long I’m willing to wait for it.

4. Emotion & Expression
How do you use your art to evoke emotions, and what role does emotion play in your creative process?
Answer: Emotion is how I get people to actually feel migration, rather than just acknowledge it as an issue. Statistics about displacement rarely move anyone for long, but a hand that stays raised after the person it was meant for has disappeared does. I’m not interested in documenting migration as a political event — I’m interested in the precise gesture that carries its entire emotional cost: a farewell, a held embrace, a child scanning a crowd for someone they can’t describe in words. Shooting in black and white and waiting for stillness rather than action are both ways of letting that feeling surface on its own. I try never to over-explain a photograph in the edit. If the feeling is there, I trust the viewer to find it.

5. Standout Projects
Can you share a project that stands out to you and describe the creative process behind it?
Answer: The project I’m showing here, Threshold, is the one that means the most to me, because it’s the project where I finally found a way to photograph migration directly. It documents the emotional landscape of London’s transport hubs — St Pancras, King’s Cross, Heathrow — spaces built purely for logistics, where I kept noticing that the human cost of leaving and arriving was happening in full public view, completely unremarked on. An elderly man waving long after the person he’s waving to has gone. A couple using every second before a departure door closes on a relationship stretched across borders. The process behind it wasn’t fast: it only came together because I kept returning to the same kind of place, over years, and let migration itself teach me what the project was actually about.

6. Feedback & Growth
How do you incorporate feedback from critics or audiences into your work, and how do you balance this with your own artistic intuition?
Answer: I listen carefully, but I try to separate two kinds of feedback — technical observations about craft, which I’m always glad to hear, and attempts to tell me what a photograph should mean, which I take more lightly. With a project like Threshold, people sometimes want a clearer political statement than I’m willing to give. I’d rather leave the work a little unresolved and trust the viewer to bring their own experience of distance and belonging to it. My intuition usually tells me when a note is genuinely useful versus when it’s pulling the work toward someone else’s idea of what it should be.

7. Motivation & Inspiration
How do you stay motivated and inspired, even when facing creative blocks or challenges?
Answer: When I feel stuck, I go back to the same kind of place I always have — a station concourse, an arrivals hall — and just watch, without the pressure of needing to come away with anything. I think the subject matter itself keeps me motivated more than any external discipline: migration and displacement are not abstract themes for me, they are how I’ve lived, and that keeps pulling me back to the work even on days when nothing I shoot feels right. I also remind myself that Threshold has taken years, not weeks, so a quiet week or month isn’t a crisis — it’s just part of how this kind of work gets made.

8. Exhibiting Work
How do you feel about exhibiting your artwork with The Holy Art Gallery, and what does this opportunity mean to you?
Answer: It means a great deal. Threshold has been a slow, mostly private project for a long time, and showing it with The Holy Art Gallery is one of the first times this body of work about migration will be in front of a wider audience in a physical space, rather than as a file on my own computer. I’m especially glad to be exhibiting in London, since the work was made entirely within the city’s own transport hubs, in a city built in large part by people who migrated here — there’s something fitting about the project finding its first real public home in exactly the kind of place it depicts.

9. Future Goals
What are your long-term goals and aspirations as an artist, and how do you plan to achieve them?
Answer: I want to take Threshold beyond London — to transit hubs and border regions in places currently living through acute displacement, so the project grows from a study of one city into something closer to a global body of work. Long-term, I’d like to see the series become a photobook as well as a touring exhibition, and to keep building a practice that other people living between countries can recognise themselves in. I’m working toward this slowly and deliberately, through exhibitions, grants, and simply continuing to make the work, rather than rushing any single project to completion.

10. Audience Connection
What do you hope viewers take away from experiencing your art, and how do you aim to connect with them on an emotional or intellectual level?
Answer: I hope viewers leave with a slightly different sense of what migration actually feels like, away from headlines and statistics — closer to the scale of a single embrace, or a single raised hand. I’m not trying to deliver a message so much as offer a recognisable feeling: most people have stood somewhere between leaving and arriving at some point, even if their own version of that experience looks nothing like an airport or a station. If someone sees their own quiet history of distance and connection reflected back at them, even briefly, I think the work has done what I wanted it to do.