Shan X. Liao is a visual designer, agency veteran, image maker, and poet. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.
廖玄林，位于纽约布鲁克林区，是一名高级平面设计师、制作总监。
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廖玄林，位于纽约布鲁克林区，是一名高级平面设计师、制作总监。
CATALOGUE
HomeAbout
Visual design
Mapping
Analog imaging
Commercial
Writing
GenAI
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/imagine in the style of william eggleston, western texas desert, trans pecos, southwestern gothic, dawn, early morning, the sky is darkest right before dawn, film grain, ektachrome, vintage 1960s photography, analog photography
A1
03.28.24 • 59ºF cloudy
America loves to make a roadside monument. You might miss it if you aren’t paying attention.
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september 2020, manzanar
inyo county, CA
excerpt from “Dear Customs Officer”
written in dec ‘21
printed in jan ‘23
2.
On the weekdays, I spent three hours a day taking violin lessons from a man in his twenties. He was a part of the People’s Liberation Army. I practiced in the concrete stairwell of his dormitory until my violin gave me a hickey. He gave me a military pin as a parting gift. I didn’t think much about it as he joked about an American customs officer finding the pin on my way home.
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By the end of that trip, dayi and yifu had purchased a luxury condo in Changying. It was situated in a brand new neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Out there, sprawling boulevards terminate at ancient dirt paths; villages crumble to ruin beneath the encroaching apartment towers; and fields give way to golf courses and Sam’s Club parking lots.
My mother had bought one too. “When we visit in the future, we can be practically neighbors,” she said to her sister. Looking back, it makes sense that the bank was nowhere to take a restless child.
6.
I walked with yeye and nainai around Nanhu Lake. We were visiting nainai’s family in a city that’s an hour’s ride on the bullet train outside of Shanghai. To me, we didn’t seem to be walking anywhere in particular in the park until yeye pointed at this extremely old yet quite ordinary boat that was docked by the lake.
He sat on a bench in front of it.
“Hey, use those photography skills and take a picture for me!”
“Get my whole body in the picture. Get the boat too.”
I took a good look at the sign next to the bench yeye was sitting on.
It said: Site of the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China.
B1
12.03.24 • west san jose • 64ºF sunny
what an odd hour of the day to be out right now, i thought, as i raced past the exit ramps of my youth. under the floodlight of the midday sun, casting short shadows on old trees and new skylines, i am awash with a temporality i had not felt since i was a child. for, at noontime, people have a place to be.
here i am, arms outstretched, as if in a cursed embrace, i am locked in a danse macabre with the four wheels of Progress.
i feel neither push nor pull. my words froth at the tips of my fingers, held back in balance by the lullaby of the lanes. this is the tail end of a bargain for a life of leisure at the risk of a gruesome, senseless death by gravity.
and when i get the chance to pull over, finally, heaven willing, i will write them down.
san francisco municipal railway map (inset) may ‘20
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anachronism and life at the end of history • march ‘25
B2
oda to the zine “Dear Customs Officer” • jan ‘25
“thank you for visiting us, teacher!”
said the engineer, wistfully
backed by her ranks, nodding in unison
in this life,
if, and only if
you manage to 努力學好數理化,
you will never have to have a boss at work again
in fact,
(as the rest of the saying goes)
if, and only if
you manage to try hard studying 數理化,
走遍天下都不怕
and nobody except for me will tell you this, that,
if, and only if
you fully exert yourself mastering 數理化,
you can walk to edges of all under heaven
and not be afraid
these three worn words,
math, physics, chemistry,
are just a way to say that i love you
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view of the diablo range from mt. umunhum, aug. ‘20
7.
I handed the customs officer my arrival card and passport.
She looked at me, then my papers, then back at me again, and gestured at the thermal flask on my backpack.
“What’s inside?”
“Water.”
“Drink.”
“Mmm?”
“All of it.”
—
8.
“I know some friends who visited China before COVID, and one of them—she told me that when she arrived at Pudong Airport, the customs officer greeted her with, ‘How’d it feel to sell your country abroad?’”
In that moment my mother and I shared a genuine but tenuous chuckle.
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/imagine in the style of a 1960s historical photo, a chinese woman in lab robes at work at a space agency, scientist, worker, probe, engineer, lander, spacecraft, analog photography, 35mm, film grain
C1
in a caption • 05.20.23
i’ve been telling people that lately i’ve been having daily, recurring “doll moments” in which i give myself a few minutes to just lie there, be still, and do nothing. for just a brief part of the day, i don’t have to think about worldly concerns like self accountability or personal responsibility. as a doll, i don’t have to worry about my vibe and aesthetic or the shape of my body and happily wear whatever i’m given for the day. i don’t have to change my face twice a day, and hats and button-downs and denim jeans would look cute on me every day and not be some kinda hit or miss affair. i don’t have to stay hydrated or socialize or call Cigna or correct my posture. as a doll, i am afforded a moment to not exist in accordance to anyone’s wants including my own and not dwell on if this is the kind of life that i saw myself living.
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three years after they arrived in beijing, a great famine rips through the countryside with tremendous devastation.
thirty years after that, my mother finds herself with her colleagues on a bus rumbling through the lower deck of the bay bridge taking them to their internships at the oakland city center marriott. she gazes out the window at the passing cantilever in wonder: she’s never crossed a bridge this tall before.
another thirty-odd years later, my grandmother finds herself once again wandering the cavernous hallways of the mcmansion where she currently lives with her daughter.
she’s been doing this for years, turning the corners in search of her grandchild who had already left to move on. she approaches her own daughter, sitting in her home office flanked by dual computer monitors, to check and see if she is still there.
chinese apartment signs • march ‘22
9.
Yifu lit another cigarette. The late afternoon sun shone diffusely through the wildfire smoke. He told me back in Beijing, he kept a notebook under his seat in his taxicab. He said he would write stories about the people he drove at the end of a shift.
“Where’s it now?” I asked, with youthful innocence. “We could make something with it.”
“I burned it,” he said, without hesitating, taking a deep, unaffected drag.
C4
12.07.24
estrangement:
i wear it like a statement piece—
the choker, formerly a collar,
seeing another in yourself.
be it sights, sounds, and locations familiar, i grow a fondness for ghosts,
like a hole-in-the-wall, remodeled, but it still remains present.
the broth tastes the same,
but the portions are now smaller.
i don’t trust you to see me in the same way as i do, so i hide in plain sight as not to fully erase myself.
D1
on my notes app • sometime in sept ‘23
my grandmother said that after my grandfather returned from korea, they were given job assignments by their local party offices in zhejiang. as outstanding comrades of revolutionary thought, they were recommended to migrate west across the country to the autonomous region of xinjiang—the homeland of the uyghur people—to start a family and carry on their duties in this grand project of nation-building. this news came to her disappointment, as she wanted to go to university instead, but this was an ideologically more pressing task and a more secure opportunity.
when my great-great-grandmother—my grandmother’s grandmother—eventually caught wind about her granddaughter moving across the country, however, she became extremely distraught and stormed off to the village party office kicking and screaming as if heaven itself were collapsing and she was the last one holding it up. the local head cadre found her absolutely inconsolable, causing an incredible scene. when my grandparents finally caught up with her, the head cadre had managed to calm her down and sent her home with them, assuring her that he’ll look into other options for them.
“i understand that the elderly can be very passionate,” he said to my grandparents as they apologized repeatedly for the trouble.
a few weeks later, my grandparents return to the party offices and they learn that they are given assignments in the young republic’s showcase capital city, beijing. it’s still away from home, but it’s certainly not as far and only a 20-hour’s trip by rail.
i’ve tried to imagine the scene as a fly on the wall: in which a young couple in their mid twenties are standing silently in a dimly lit room facing a man seated at a desk—the woman is wearing a floral blouse, her hair neatly parted into two, and the men wearing their standard-issue work jackets.
the concrete walls are painted halfway in a drab olive green, and a single lightbulb hangs from the ceiling from its cable.
the head cadre is seated, signing and stamping his way through a pile of papers, forms, and letters. a single trail of smoke emanates from the lit cigarette in the ashtray. the only sound in the room is his fountain pen scribbling quickly away over the hum of this year’s cicada bloom. in the distance, a staticky radio ekes out an interval signal from my grandparent’s future home—it’s now the top of the hour.
“here are your new residency permits and your train tickets,” he says, handing them a burgundy-colored card holder. “comrade liao, comrade zhao, congratulations.”
their shadows flicker with the oil lamp on the desk, and a smirking portrait of chairman mao watches over.
beijing historical tram map
(inset) aug ‘25
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(c. 1993-1994)
yeye & nainai were also flying back to san francisco that night after splitting off for a week in chengdu. mom’s work already paid for her’s, and i’m sticking to my original ticket.
people aspire to live to see three generations under one roof. three jets crossing the ocean through the night, though, would be beyond our ancestors’ wildest imaginations.
april ‘16