Eclipse (2023) emerged from the artist’s growing concern with the shifting boundaries of artistic freedom in an era of heightened sensitivity and moral scrutiny. Conceived during a time when nudity had become increasingly taboo within exhibition spaces, the work reflects on the tensions between censorship, vulnerability, and the ethics of representation. Rather than shying away from these challenges, the artist sought a collaborator who could embody openness and trust and expose how an ethics of collaboration could be negotiated and shared in ways that challenge convention.

This collaborator, Zhang Junjia, is central to the project. Describing herself as an ‘unconditional participant’, Zhang approaches artistic collaboration without preconditions or self-imposed limits. In artistic practice, she adopts the neutral identity of ‘they/them, a pronoun that transcends gender and individuality, allowing her to exist simultaneously as model, subject, and co-creator. Her decision to forgo payment, positions her engagement as a radical act of creative surrender and this ‘unconditional’ stance becomes a meditation on taboo itself. The work reveals the fragility of the body as a site of both restriction and liberation and explores how social anxieties surrounding nudity, desire, and propriety can obscure the deeper human dimensions of intimacy and artistic expression.

Completed alongside Waves (2023), a companion piece exploring notions of safety and exposure, Eclipse challenges the viewer to reconsider their own ethical position in the act of looking. It complicates the traditional dynamic between artist, model, and audience into a shared space of inquiry, one where the boundaries between seeing and being seen, risk and trust, art and morality, are continually eclipsed.