All School by Next Wave, Artist talk: Axel and Liwen

A commissioned
text byAxel GarayLiwen Lian
forDigital

Artist talk: Axel and Liwen

Next Wave CEO Elyse Goldfinch sat down with Next Wave's 2025 Winter Windows artists Axel Garay and Liwen Lian to talk about technology, worldbuilding and digital art-making.

Axel and Liwen are two visionary artists whose practices push boundaries and invite bold conversations.

Their digital artworks were shown across Next Wave's digital screens over some of the longest nights of the year as part of the program.

Axel’s work Sik offers a powerful reflection on consumption and future ecologies through a First Nations lens, while Liwen’s Nightfall immerses us in a poetic, otherworldly journey that blurs the lines between the real and the imagined.

Their work challenges, inspires, and expands the ways we see and engage with the world around us.

Listen to the artist talk here.

Back to Digital

(close)

Axel Garay

Engagement: Digital

Axel Garay (Meriam/Puerto Rican/Malaysian) is an emerging queer First Nations interdisciplinary artist and storyteller working with the still and moving image. He utilises digital video, installation and alternative photographic processes to explore themes of technology ethics, desire, spirituality and human psychology.

Axel was one of Next Wave's 2025 Winter Windows artists. His work, Sik, was shown on the digital screens at Brusnwick Mechanics Institute.

Sik (pronounced 'seek') is a two channel video portrait series grappling with a future land filled with our trashy remains.

→ Website

(close)

Liwen Lian

Engagement: Digital

Liwen Lian is a Hui-Chinese visual artist, designer, and community arts labourer. They hold a Bachelor of Interior Design (Honours) from RMIT University. Their practice explores how visual and material culture—objects, technologies, and environments—shape, distort, and reimagine identities and notions of humanness.

Working collaboratively across photography, architecture, digital design, and fine art, Liwen creates surrealist and poetic performances, films, and installations where they navigate the tensions between selfhood and systemic structures, weaving narratives from fragments of personal and collective memory.

Beyond their studio practice, Liwen facilitates community arts workshops and has been a guest speaker for City Stories, a research project initiated by UnStudio and presented at MPavilion. They recently completed the Young Creatives Lab residency at SIGNAL Arts, supported by the City of Melbourne.

Liwen was one of Next Wave's 2025 Winter Windows artists. Their work, Nightfall, was shown across the digital screens at Brunswick Mechanics Institute.

Drawing from Islamic mysticism, Christian allegory, and Chinese cosmology, Nightfall questions the boundaries of reality in an age where digital illusions blur truth.

→ Website