Lian Loke is an interdisciplinary artist, based in Warrane/Sydney, working with the body and movement as material. Drawing from Bodyweather, somatic and shamanic dance traditions, her work blends performance, costume and installation to explore shifting hybrid identities, ritual, energy and metamorphic embodiment. She likes to perform in non-traditional performance spaces to stir up the sediment, spirits and status quo - most comfortable in the in-between spaces shaped by her Malaysian-Chinese and Anglo-Australian heritage. Her working processes are often bottom-up, generating actions, meanings and new movement languages from improvisations and interactions with props, costume and interactive machines. Her approach to costuming the body in performance explores costume as sculpture and environment, opening the sensuous and liminal space between the body and cloth. She trains in the Japanese Bodyweather dance methodology with de Quincey Co (2007 – present). From 1998 to 2006, she trained under American choreographer Annetta Luce in somatic and shamanic dance practices, informed by Body-Mind Centering and Qigong energy cultivation.

As a curator, she has produced exhibitions presenting state-of-the-art ideas that critique and materialise creative and speculative applications of emerging technologies. SHErobots: Tool, Toy, Companion (2022) is the first exhibition of its kind in Australia to showcase the pioneering and emerging work of women in robotics, across art, design, architecture and technology; followed by Ecologies of Care (2024) in The Netherlands.

She is passionate about making our cities, streets and public spaces more creative, playable and liveable. She was a member of the Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, Inner West Council and is a founding member of the Inner West Creative Network established in 2022.