I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US

I Hope Someday You’ll Join Us proposes fiction as a form of social architecture. The worlds we inhabit are sustained by shared belief, and new realities emerge when alternative stories are rehearsed until they become livable.

We do not enter the future by discovering it, but by imagining it together.

I Hope Someday You’ll Join Us proposes fiction as a form of social architecture. The worlds we inhabit are sustained by shared belief, and new realities emerge when alternative stories are rehearsed until they become livable.

Across Paris, Sopot, and New York, Nyo Jinyong Lian stages encounters among women who enact gestures of balance, guidance, and mutual reliance. These scenes function not as representations but as prototypes—models for relationships that do not yet fully exist, where trust is composed rather than assumed.

Drawing on fairy tales, diasporic experience, and contemporary life, the work constructs autonomous visual fables in which intimacy becomes infrastructural: a site for designing alliances grounded in shared vulnerability rather than hierarchy, continuity shaped by matrilineal imagination rather than inherited scripts.

Described by the artist as “visual rehearsals for a society that does not yet exist,” the images invite viewers to inhabit a speculative present where cooperation is chosen and belonging becomes a creative act.

The title is both invitation and promise: a community forming not through conformity, but through the courage to imagine otherwise. These images do not document the world as it is; they suggest how it might be rebuilt—gesture by gesture, relation by relation—until another reality becomes possible.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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The Sharpshooter, 2026: A figure aims behind her without turning around, guided by a mirror. Drawing on Janus, the two-faced Roman god, the image blurs the boundary between past and future, bringing both into a single gesture. The shot is aimed not at what lies ahead, but at what remains unresolved.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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Is All for You presents multiple pairs of hands converging toward a single point, palms pressed together in a gesture suggesting prayer, cooperation, or concentrated force. The bodies remain outside the frame, reducing the action to a collective mechanism without identifiable authors.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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Swan Song, 2026: The ancient Greeks believed that the swan remained silent throughout its life, singing only once, at the moment before death. To me, that song is a graceful shedding. An old role completes its death through performance, while a new one is born from its echo.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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A figure holds a sheet of paper perforated with numerous heart shapes in front of her face like a mask. Light passing through the cutouts projects a pattern of dark hearts onto her skin, while another pair of hands helps support the sheet. The mask both conceals and inscribes, replacing facial expression with imposed imagery. Assistance becomes indistinguishable from control.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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Clown, 2025 Two identical bodies float in still water, their faces just above the surface. Each bears a red circle across the skin, partially submerged and dissolving into the depth below. The mark suggests both connection and separation, as the waterline interrupts its continuity. Presence and disappearance coexist, making the bodies appear suspended between emergence and erasure.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - A Way This Could Feel, 2026
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A Way This Could Feel, 2026

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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Love River, 2026: Venus was born from the sea. In Love River, there are no gods. As Nietzsche once declared, God is dead. Everything must be imagined again. I imagine trust as the infrastructure of this still-unformed world, and love as its most generative architecture. Amid turbulent waters, we create new ways of flying. May we all find companions for new adventures.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - omnipotent youth, 2026
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omnipotent youth, 2026

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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To Those Who Walk Beside Us, June 2026: When threatened, a sea cucumber can split itself in two: one part is sacrificed, while the other survives and regenerates. Unlike this creature, we cannot physically separate death from rebirth. Yet another kind of division remains possible: between the body and poetry, between what we lose and what we continue to become.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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Two twin sisters sit closely together at a table, their arms loosely intertwined in the soft sunlight. One holds a folded white note as its flame slowly dies out. With her other hand, she reaches across her sister's arm, covering part of her face, her fingers brushing against an eye and the corner of her mouth.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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I, And Love, And You, 2026 : A girl stands with an apple balanced on her head while drawing a bow aimed forward. Two pairs of hands pull the string, suggesting assistance or shared force, while additional figures remain partially concealed in shadow.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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Reading Lesson, 2025: Two intertwined figures attempt to read from a page as it burns between them. Communication and destruction happen at the same time, turning the act of reading into a fragile negotiation between intimacy, knowledge and power.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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I Hope Someday You’ll Join Us, 2026: Two twin sisters face each other, holding a taut white thread between their mouths. One watches the other's lips while the other keeps her eyes closed. Two short beams of yellow light fall across their heads against a misty, rain-soaked background.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Empath, 2026 April
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Empath, 2026 April

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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Make Me Feel Good, 2026: On a September morning, firelight trembles in my clear lenses. Two small seas of flame move where the world should be. I think I am looking at the fire. But it is the fire looking back at me.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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Don’t Let Yourself Be Hurt This Time, 2026: I want to record how power reshapes a person, so that such realities are not allowed to disappear. We remember the insistent questions, the exacting observations, the smallest shifts in attention. We remember a woman who was alive, alert, and fully present.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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Murmuration, 2026: In a murmuration, no bird leads. Each moves in response to those nearest to it, until thousands of separate bodies appear to breathe as one. I’m drawn to this intelligence of the flock: how we might move together without surrendering ourselves, and how another form of belonging can emerge through attention, trust and constant negotiation.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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A Battle, 2026: If a battle has colors, they are red and blue, black and white, yellow and purple, and so on. They are the colors of opposition, the colors of spear and shield, the colors that refuse defeat. If a battle has colors, none of them surrender.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Image from the I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US photography project
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The First Sister depicts two women balancing a piece of fruit between their foreheads. The task requires precise coordination and sustained attention, turning a childlike game into a tense exchange. At the moment captured, their focus begins to waver. Cooperation remains, but alignment falters, and the fragile equilibrium is on the verge of collapse.

© Nyo Jinyong Lian - Cat’s Cradle, 2026
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Cat’s Cradle, 2026

I HOPE SOMEDAY YOU’LL JOIN US by Nyo Jinyong Lian

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