Untitled

It is bright here. Not hot, although it should be, but not cold either. This is a temperate world. It is an ecstasy of spring and skin, of pastel colours that spill out like sounds, like escaped cries of pleasure that discandy across the beds, canvases.

When I first encounter Lucy Liu’s work in ACCA, I feel a strange relief wash over me.

En Cachette.                            Moi et les autres.                                Je suis. Envois-moi.

In hiding.                                Me and the others.                              I am. Send me.

En Cachette.                                     Moi et les autres.                              Je suis. Envois-moi.

In hiding.                                          Me and the others.                                          I am. Send me.

A triptych of paintings. In the first, two women in bed together. The second is a woman alone, touching herself. In the third, a man and woman have sex. The floury bodies yawn and collapse into each other, into swathes of fabric, into a world where sex is not grabbing or colliding but a melting. A becoming. Bedrooms with no hard corners.

Have I ever collapsed during sex? Have I ever been twinned by a lover?

I have stepped inside the gap as I stepped inside another person. I have hovered with another in the realm of not knowing,

and this is a kind of loss, a kind of rebirth.

The longer I sit opposite the paintings, the worse my body feels. 

It is days like this where my body and my consciousness feel divorced.

My body aches and locks, while my soul moves and slips around,

desperately looking for a place to rest or expand. A soft crevice.

On first encounter with the paintings, I am flaring from chronic pain. My body is taut and angry, unable to relinquish comfortably to the shape of my jeans, my coat. There is a bench placed in the middle of the room, creating a division between Liu’s paintings and the video work opposite. I sit on it for a long time, looking up. Studying. Thinking about sex.

Above me, the two entwined women are identical, twinned in their embrace. Sex in the world of the painting has granted them total mutual understanding. It has conjoined them, rendered them the same.

They look back, shocked to be caught in this way.

The pearl pink vulva looks too. It’s not clear who it belongs to; their bodies are so indistinguishable.

When they have sex, she lets her eyes float up to the ceiling or else closes them and tries as hard as she can to focus. Think about what he is doing now and what you are doing and where to move or put your hand or your mouth. But she can’t help but drift away. The person there is exciting, it’s not that they aren’t, but look at the way the light shakes on the wall and watch the fly that buzzes and bangs against the window and shouldn’t she let it out?

I remember a damp bed.

Red towel. Pink and blue sheets.

My skin drying against someone else’s.

Love and sex have rendered me as lonely as they have brought me close to others.

The paintings are Liu’s interpretation of shunga, a Japanese art form that flourished during the Edo period (1600-1868). Shunga is the depiction of erotic scenes, hand painted on small woodblocks, or scrolls. They frequently depicted queer sex scenes, as well as heterosexual ones, often collected in albums. In her paintings, Liu has transposed the style of shunga onto three large canvases. The size of the works, and the bright pastel colours, are part of Liu’s effort to create a depiction of sexuality that is public and yet personal. Her aim is to depict characters who are on display but remain fully agentic.

I catch a fragment of text from the video opposite

‘… a place where no one is asking anything from you’

I crouch to write it down, then raise my head and look up at the masturbating woman. The angle of her body and the angle of mine are paired. She lies upwards of me, and our knees bow and spread in mirror images. My feet planted on the ground, my back upright, her body pillowing on the bed. If someone pushed the middle of my chest and knocked me over, we’d be lying in identical positions. As we are now, I could be her partner, giving, worshipping, while she floats away into pleasure.

My calves burn a little. I could drop and crawl towards her. I stand up.

No matter what we want, what we do,

there exists a gap between us

and our beloved.

 Is the loneliness in the gap or in our desire to close it?

As a child, Lucy Liu walked in on her mother changing. She remembers her mother’s shock, her reflexive grab for something to cover herself with. The covering. The body. Both of them exposed. This was Liu’s first conscious encounter with the naked body as something shameful. As something to be hidden. It is from there that the vision for these paintings was born. This is the fantasy Liu has created. The fantasy of a world without shame.

When I was ten my mother told me not to have sex till I was 25. She told me about her first kiss, in a pool. I looked adoring at photos of her at my age, with her Beatles haircut, and smelled sunscreen and chlorine. My first kiss came later, later than most of my friends, with a girl dressed as a detective at a stranger’s birthday party. The crowd was a little older than me, but I remember ABBA playing in the background.

Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight.

She had glitter on her eyelids.

 The paintings play a lot with gaze. It’s true they are without shame, but they are also without privacy. At any moment the figures could be observed en flagrante, whether they wanted to be or not. Our ability to perceive them doesn’t read as an engagement with them as exhibitionists but rather places the audience in the position of voyeur.

He tells me, and I remember the feeling of being in a car crash, the one time I was, and the way my vision went sideways and everything turned into shards of green and grey as a tree hurtled towards the windshield, the windshield hurtling towards a tree. I remember being a teenager and pouring hot coffee over my hand. The smell of piss in my ballet tights, and cheeks hot with shame, and I was only six but too old already for accidents like that.

The first time he’d changed, the latest time he’d changed, all the times I said I’ll go, I swear to fucking god I’ll go, this isn’t normal, and I didn’t do it.  It all comes welling up, all the worst moments, chewing back out of me. The worst moments form a composite with the best moments, a collage of wet lumps of paper stuck on a bathroom wall. He is leaving. There is a plane ticket. 

There are weeks left, but not many. At no point do I think: I will end it first. 

I will not stay just to be left.

But that’s not what he wants. He wants us to be together, until he wants us to be apart.

So I wait.

She has signed each painting as Yu Ling, but they are being exhibited under Lucy Liu. Her famous name. I think about double identities. The face we show the world. The face that exists for the ones we love, and the final face which is only ours to see. Is she more Yu Ling when she is alone or more Lucy Liu? And can she hide in either, when both are now public?

I want to make him hurt. I want to make love to him, and so we do, over and over.

There are windows in the backgrounds of the first two paintings.

You can still have sex when you’re ugly, like how I’m ugly now.

The two women look at us, not each other.

You can chafe against someone, feel your thighs erode, and sometimes it is better than before,

because without my beauty, his has become larger and more shocking

The solo woman closes her eyes.

and my need for him is as great as the sands’ for the sea.

The woman in the last painting too has her eyes closed, and the man in the last painting has no eyes at all. They have evaporated into passion.

He doesn’t know when he’ll go. He says,

‘I’ll come back.’

There is no shame but there is no privacy either.

I turn my face away and say,

‘There might be no me to come back to.’

There’s an element of cheekiness present in shunga that is missing from Liu’s paintings. Shunga is intentionally funny, not just sexy. In fact, the humour is an inherent part of what works to make shunga so stimulating. The audience is drawn in.

Maybe that’s the quality needed to transform these works into something truly erotic. Comedy.

We were in the back of the car. We got into the back of the car. Neither of us could speak. I looked out the window. I couldn’t—I couldn’t look at him. Before, in the bar. He’d come around to my side of the table after our friends had left. And there was this pressure. In his eyes.

It felt like his mouth was on me already. Just from the way he looked at me. And then he kissed me, in the bar, and he put his thumb in my mouth, all the way in, even though there were still people around. And I thought about how I’d only kissed someone in a bar like this once before, and how it hadn’t really been like this, not at all, because nothing could be like this, or ever would be. There were kids next to us. They’d been smoking weed, and the girl had greened out and thrown up in her lap, and normally I would go over and say something, see if she was okay, but I thought fuck that girl. I only cared about where his mouth would go next. 

Then I stopped kissing him.

Somewhere along the way

desire and loneliness have become inextricable to me.

Maybe it has always been this way.

After visiting the exhibition, I entered a weeks-long period of extended insanity. Every time I thought about Lucy Liu’s paintings, I felt tense. Angry, even.

I think of Lucy Liu’s mother, covering herself up,

and the winter of last year, when I layered myself

in soft and shapeless clothes, so that nobody would see the body

that had become the site of my shame.

I think the paintings are too perfect. The fantasy Liu has created is too complete. These works are shameless but not brazen. The scenes they depict are explicit but not rebellious. The desire they depict combats against nothing, because for these figures there is nothing to combat. There is only each other, themselves, and openness.

I look at the paintings and I feel envy towards the woman who has made them.

Made them because they were true to her.

Or maybe she had just needed them to exist

in order to create a world where they could be true.

The couples depicted literally meld into one another.

I weep. The laundry piles up.

Dirty and clean. Impossible to sort, to put away.

I think about pleasure, and sadness wells up, bringing its own soothing.

Numbness.

I have found more grace in dark, allergic bedrooms than any wealth of flowers.

Bridie Noonan is a writer, actor, and dramaturg, living and working on unceded Wurundjeri country. Her work largely concerns the eerie and the bodily, exploring themes of desire, illness, and magic. Bridie has provided dramaturgy across both contemporary dance and theatre productions, and has been published in Voiceworks Magazine and The Suburban Review. In 2026, she was awarded the Emerging Writers’ Festival’s Speculate Prize for a short story. She is interested in using small things to talk about big things.

Image credit:

Futurama, Twentieth Century Fox