In his sculptures,
videos,
sound installations, photographs and texts, he explores powerlessness, failure and vulnerability through a mixture of intimate experience and collective history. In doing so, he questions the individual's relationship to childhood, family, work, capitalist production systems and leisure society. With his works, he constructs visual narratives that play with scale and materials and question what it means to be a hero. In an interview with
Hans Ulrich Obrist, he cites the oeuvre of
Cosima von Bonin and
Ida Ekblad as influences. Thomas Liu Le Lann was co-founder and co-administrator of Cherish, an artist-run exhibition space in Geneva, in collaboration with
Ser Serpas,
Mohamed Almusibli and James Bantone. His texts are often part of his exhibitions. He names
Marguerite Duras, in particular
Un barrage contre le Pacifique, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein and ''l'Amant
, Paul B. Preciado, Guillaume Dustan as well as Hervé Guibert, Voyage avec deux enfants
and Le Mausolée des amants'' as authors whose works are of fundamental importance to him. he created a giant glass
pacifier, which he placed on a stack of pallets. The raw, untreated wood stands in stark contrast to the smooth teat. Liu Le Lann's works are sometimes fluffy and soft, sometimes stretchy, then again cool and smooth.
Terry cloth meets glass,
velvet nestles against vinyl. In his works, he repeatedly makes references to people who were close to him. The installation entitled
Amore E Morte from 2021 consists of leather shoes on a glass floor in which you can see yourself reflected, reminding the artist of Milo, a former lover. A publication with contributions by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Charles Teyssou and
Ser Serpas was published on this subject. Thomas Liu Le Lann developed the
Soft Heroes series. He cites
Claes Oldenburg and
Cosima von Bonin as references. The art critic
Paul Clinton compared them to "the untraceable love objects in
Dennis Cooper's fiction", because the boys Cooper is obsessed with have no recognizable characteristics and refuse to express themselves. In the
Soft Heroes series, he deals with the elaboration of fictions inspired by popular culture. In this way, he creates these
soft sculptures that are installed on the floor as figures without a face or expression, whose only visible attitude seems to be that they have given up on the world around them. The gigantic figures are slack, sometimes bordering on formlessness, like overworked, modern and tired superheroes. Dressed in a
harlequin mask, they could also be on their way to the next bank robbery. For his participation in the Berthoud, Lissignol-Chevalier and Galland scholarships of the City of Geneva, he was awarded a prize in the visual arts category in September 2023. For the presentation at the
Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, he created an installation consisting of two left, glass
boxing gloves and a video showing him in
fencing gear. For the
House of Switzerland – Maison Suisse of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, he developed the video installation entitled
GYM, which shows a group of participants with limited technical and physical abilities oscillating between improvisation and editing, inspired by the language of sports television. The video-installation
GYM was part of his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany entitled
Entertain in fall 2024 at the Galerie für Gegenwartskunst E-Werk Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. == Awards ==