Lean Lui has built a world of her own. She calls it Girl’s Universe: a universe inhabited by girls, uniforms, solitude, desire, and images suspended somewhere between something extremely pure and something vaguely unsettling.

“I have always kept an utopia of my own in my heart,” the artist says. Even if this ideal world were small enough to reach only a few people, for the photographer it would still have meaning as long as it could become a refuge in the darkness for someone.

At first, this utopia was mainly an internal one. In her early works, enclosed spaces connected to female adolescence became places to explore solitude, trauma, obsessions, and purity. Over time, however, Lui also began looking at what happens outside those rooms: capitalism, power, and the structures that shape the way young women’s bodies are looked at and represented.

White Barracks, the third chapter of Girl’s Universe, marks precisely this shift in perspective: the intimate world of the girls meets the outside world and its structures of power.

Lui imagines an island that does not exist. An army of girls lives on that island. They wear white uniforms, train, and watch the artillery fire in the distance. In the story created by the artist, at the center of the island stands a crystal monument bearing a phrase that seems to sum up the entire project: “protect the purest heart with the most ruthless weapons”.
It is a deliberately evident contradiction.

To protect something fragile, Lui’s girls must adopt exactly the aesthetic of what they seek to defend themselves from: discipline, the military, uniforms, weapons, control.

Behind that small imaginary militia lie very real issues. Lui describes White Barracks as a response to the commodification and sexualization of young women’s minds and bodies by the market and the external gaze. Her protagonists are not simply bodies to be observed: they occupy space and choose to be there.
This is where Girl’s Universe stops seeming like merely a refuge.

Lean Lui’s utopia is not about pretending that the world outside does not exist. It is about imagining how it could be different.

This article was created in collaboration with Luigi Falanga and Gaia Forlin aka @superottomag