Notes
This Is a Room
Lindsay Liang
Composed of the following oil-on-wood panels: A Nice Welcome, In the Tub, In My House, Apple Situation, Go Drinking, Self Portrait, Music Party, Dreams, Reading with Friends, Flute Performance, The Changing Room, Float Test, Pillow War, About Masks, Ballet Practice, Stay Over, Among Beasts.
Medium: oil on wood.
Public Domain artwork referenced in this piece:
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Hogarth Press, 1929.
Artist Statement
This Is a Room is a 50 × 40 inch painting–sculpture installation inspired by Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). The work combines a series of thickly painted oil panels on wood with a central curved mirror etched with the phrase “This is a room,” forming a modular wall structure. Each panel depicts a masked girl in muted pastel tones, engaged in quiet, oddly stiff gestures, washing, playing a flute, sitting by water, or handling simple objects. These small rooms appear visually unified, yet remain isolated from one another.
The project takes Woolf’s insistence on women’s independent space as a point of departure, shifting the question from ownership of space to the structures of seeing and being seen. The figures wear masks that obscure identity and prevent recognition; they are not simply refusing to be looked at but staging an experiment in how one might endure being looked at. Their repetitive, childlike actions, gestures that never quite fit their bodies, render subjectivity as a rehearsal rather than a stable fact.
In creating these images, I sought to return to a child’s way of apprehending the world, where gestures are both exploratory and estranged. The brushwork remains thick and resistant, echoing the difficulty of securing meaning in actions that loop without resolution. What emerges is not a triumphal vision of creative freedom but an atmosphere of delicate isolation: a condition in which expression has been granted, yet certainty never arrives.
One hundred years after Woolf’s lecture, “women’s expression” circulates as a cultural theme, often contained by expectations of intimacy, softness, healing, or trauma. The masked girls point to this paradox: even when allowed to speak, one is circumscribed by styles of speech that are already prescribed. Their silence, their stiff mimicry, their uncanny poses expose the instability of agency in a system where visibility itself can become another form of confinement.
The mirror interrupts this sequence. By etching the phrase “This is a room” onto a reflective surface, the work implicates the viewer directly: you step into the frame of the installation, your body inserted into the fragile architecture of the panels. The mirror insists that the room is not only the painted panels, but also the structure of watching, echo, and hesitation that takes shape between work and spectator.
This Is a Room is less about completing identity than about registering its incompleteness. It offers a constellation of provisional rooms where gestures repeat, masks remain, and the possibility of self-recognition is suspended.
About the Artist: Lindsay Liang
Studio Art Program, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, Undergraduate Student
Lindsay Liang is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York. Working across painting, sculpture, and hybrid practices, she explores memory, identity, and perception through fragmented figuration and modular arrangements. Her installations examine how rooms, mirrors, and stages shape subjectivity, often incorporating masks and childlike gestures to evoke estrangement, repetition, and quiet unease.
Alongside her studio practice, Liang investigates intersections of biological archaeology and visual art, examining how cultural memory is reconstructed through material traces and aesthetic forms. Her work has been shown at Culture Lab Long Island City, the Bobst Library Gallery, and Rosenberg Gallery. Liang is currently an undergraduate student in the Studio Art program at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Footnote
To access a digitized version of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf:
Citation:
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own / Virginia Woolf. New York (State): Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/ucbk.ark:/28722/h2j960j8h.