Late one April night, the artist Liao Wen was in her studio in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, listing off the many instruments that she uses to make her astonishing art.
“These are my chisels,” she said in a video interview, panning the camera about.
“Chisels, chisels, chisels.
They are alluring and frightening, psychologically fraught, and they have helped make her, at 29, “one of China’s most innovative young women artists,” as Wang Chunchen, the deputy director of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (C.A.F.A.)
Art Museum in Beijing, and the curator-critic Jia Qianfan put it last year in Art in America magazine.