How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of Our Time
How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of Our Time
临界主义（Liminalism）如何成为我们这个时代的标志性美学
Giorgio de Chirico, “The Red Tower” (1913), oil on canvas, held by the Guggenheim Museum (photo public domain via Wikimedia Commons) 乔治·德·基里科（Giorgio de Chirico），《红塔》（1913），布面油画，现藏于古根海姆博物馆（图片来源：维基共享资源，公有领域）
Had Century III Mall in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania not closed seven years ago, the shopping center — the third-largest in the world when it opened, with 200 tenants — would be approaching its 50th anniversary. Anchored by defunct local department store chains, including Joseph Horne Company, Gimbels, and Kaufmann’s, Century III had been constructed atop a slag heap — a mound of metallic industrial detritus produced as part of the steel-making process — maintained by US Steel. With a name meant to evoke the bicentennial of 1976, the mall made it four decades before finally closing like so many similar shopping centers throughout the country. Today, all that remains are the shells of a Sears, a Macy’s furniture store, and a food court, all set to be demolished soon. It’s the sort of nexus that writer Matthew Newton describes in Shopping Mall (2017) as a “ghost mall”: “places where past, present, and future simultaneously collapsed.” 如果位于宾夕法尼亚州西米夫林的“第三世纪购物中心”（Century III Mall）七年前没有关闭，那么这个开业时曾是全球第三大、拥有200家租户的购物中心，本应迎来其50周年纪念。该中心由Joseph Horne Company、Gimbels和Kaufmann’s等已倒闭的当地百货连锁店作为主力店，建立在由美国钢铁公司（US Steel）维护的矿渣堆之上——那是一堆炼钢过程中产生的金属工业废料。这个名字旨在纪念1976年的美国建国两百周年，该商场在最终像全国许多类似的购物中心一样倒闭之前，坚持了四十年。如今，剩下的只有西尔斯（Sears）、梅西百货（Macy’s）家具店和美食广场的空壳，且都即将被拆除。作家马修·牛顿（Matthew Newton）在《购物中心》（2017）一书中将这种枢纽描述为“幽灵商场”：“过去、现在和未来同时坍塌的地方。”
Century III Mall in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania (photo Dave Columbus via Facebook) 位于宾夕法尼亚州西米夫林的第三世纪购物中心（图片来源：Dave Columbus，来自Facebook）
In an image posted by Dave Columbus to the Facebook group “liminal photography” on November 11, 2025, the sheer eeriness of the abandoned mall is evident in all of its forlorn splendor. Gray-carpeted and white-walled, the back wall features a ’70s color scheme of painted orange-and-green squares. The image exemplifies the popular internet aesthetic of “liminality”: the exploration of spaces that appear “in between,” that are uncanny and uncomfortable despite being mundane or familiar. Emptied of stores and absent of humans, Columbus’s photograph captures the melancholic discomfort of liminal aesthetics — the strange, simultaneous pull of disquiet and nostalgia that makes this bottom-up, crowd-curated digital movement among the most pertinent and explicit artistic reactions to the strange, surreal experience of living in our particular moment of dystopian late capitalism. 在戴夫·哥伦布（Dave Columbus）于2025年11月11日发布在Facebook小组“临界摄影”（liminal photography）上的一张照片中，这座废弃商场的阴森感在其凄凉的辉煌中显露无遗。灰色的地毯和白色的墙壁，后墙上绘有70年代风格的橙色和绿色方块。这张照片体现了互联网上流行的“临界性”（liminality）美学：对那些看起来处于“中间地带”的空间的探索，它们尽管平凡或熟悉，却让人感到离奇和不安。哥伦布的照片清空了商店，不见人影，捕捉到了临界美学中忧郁的不适感——这种不安与怀旧交织的奇特拉力，使得这场自下而上、由大众策划的数字运动，成为对我们当下反乌托邦晚期资本主义时代那种奇特、超现实生活体验最贴切、最直白的艺术回应之一。
Popular Internet meme known as “The Backrooms,” first published in 2011 (photo via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0) 被称为“后室”（The Backrooms）的流行互联网模因，首次发布于2011年（图片来源：维基共享资源，CC0 1.0）
As an internet phenomenon, the most recent iteration of liminal aesthetics can be primarily traced to a 2019 Creepypasta collaborative short story entitled “The Backrooms,” which first appeared on the message board 4chan. Inspired by an unsettling and depressing image of a yellowed commercial backroom with fluorescent lighting and dirty carpets, devoid of either furniture or people, it imagined the space depicted (in reality, a hobby shop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 2003) as a kind of interdimensional realm of recursive, infinite variations. An anonymous poster in 2019 described the concept of the “Backrooms” as being constituted by “nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights … [across] approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms.” The purgatorial realm of “Backrooms” lore is composed of these non-spaces — a dimension of empty airport lobbies and hotel hallways, offices at night and closed grocery stores. A cross between the stories of Jorge Luis Borges and Mark Z. Danielewski, the mythos sparked a vibrant online community. So popular was “The Backrooms” that a YouTube series based on the (otherwise public domain) subject has been optioned for an A24 film. 作为一种互联网现象，临界美学的最新迭代主要可以追溯到2019年出现在留言板4chan上的一篇名为《后室》（The Backrooms）的Creepypasta协作短篇小说。其灵感来自于一张令人不安且压抑的照片：一个泛黄的商业后室，有着荧光灯和肮脏的地毯，既没有家具也没有人。它将照片中描绘的空间（实际上是2003年威斯康星州奥什科什的一家模型店）想象成一种递归、无限变化的跨维度领域。2019年，一位匿名发帖者将“后室”的概念描述为：“除了陈旧潮湿地毯的恶臭、单调黄色的疯狂、荧光灯无休止的背景噪音……（在）大约六亿平方英里的随机分割的空房间里，别无他物。”“后室”传说中的炼狱领域由这些“非场所”组成——一个充满空荡荡的机场大厅、酒店走廊、深夜办公室和关闭的杂货店的维度。这个神话融合了豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯（Jorge Luis Borges）和马克·Z·丹尼尔夫斯基（Mark Z. Danielewski）的故事风格，激发了一个充满活力的在线社区。“后室”非常受欢迎，以至于一部基于该主题（原本属于公有领域）的YouTube系列剧已被A24电影公司买下改编权。
@unicosobreviviente Responder a @memide.23 ♬ sonido original - Único Sobreviviente （TikTok视频内容略）
Central to the liminal aesthetic, whether in “The Backrooms” or otherwise, is the complete absence of humans, whereby the viewer of the image must imagine herself as the only person in the scene. This intentionally alienating experience — a personal loneliness that’s borderline apocalyptic — is similar to the feeling conveyed by the Spanish TikToker Javier’s 2021 clips, in which he claimed to have time-traveled to 2027, and saw that normally bustling social and commercial spaces were now totally devoid of human beings. Filmed during the 2020 COVID-19 shutdowns, Javier’s short films hover at the margins of the broader popularity of the liminal aesthetic, which was perfectly attuned to the surreal incongruity of shutdowns as well as the digital siloing of individuals, as smartphones became more omnipresent and social bonds subsequently further frayed. 临界美学的核心，无论是在“后室”还是其他作品中，都是人类的完全缺失，这使得图像的观看者必须想象自己是场景中唯一的人。这种刻意疏离的体验——一种近乎末日感的个人孤独——与西班牙TikTok博主哈维尔（Javier）2021年的短片所传达的感觉相似，他在片中声称自己穿越到了2027年，看到原本熙熙攘攘的社交和商业空间现在完全没有人影。哈维尔的短片拍摄于2020年新冠疫情封锁期间，徘徊在临界美学广泛流行的边缘。这种美学与封锁带来的超现实不协调感，以及个人在数字时代的孤立状态完美契合，因为智能手机变得无处不在，社会纽带随之进一步破裂。
While “The Backrooms” is a popular iteration of the aesthetic, most examples of the liminal are untethered from any particular narrative — an organic art movement of found images curated for the psychological effect they inculcate, equal parts uneasiness and mystery. As Karl Emil Koch put it in Musée Magazine: the “type of emotional space that conveys … nostalgia, lostness, and uncertainty … spaces of transition — of becoming instead of being.” Certainly, the aesthetic is of our zeitgeist. Look to the numbers alone: A Facebook group named “Liminal Spaces” has 228,000 followers sharing images, while “Liminal Photography” numbers 357,300. r/LiminalSpace on Reddit welcomes 136,000 weekly visitors. 虽然“后室”是这种美学的一种流行迭代，但大多数临界空间的例子并不依附于任何特定的叙事——这是一种有机的艺术运动，通过收集图像来营造特定的心理效果，既让人不安又充满神秘感。正如卡尔·埃米尔·科赫（Karl Emil Koch）在《Musée杂志》中所言：这是一种“传达……怀旧、迷失和不确定性的情感空间……过渡的空间——是‘成为’而非‘存在’的空间。”毫无疑问，这种美学属于我们的时代精神。仅看数据就可见一斑：一个名为“Liminal Spaces”的Facebook小组拥有22.8万名分享图像的关注者，而“Liminal Photography”则有35.73万人。Reddit上的r/LiminalSpace每周迎来13.6万名访问者。
A running track at a gym (photo u/PresentEuphoric2216 via Reddit) 健身房的塑胶跑道（图片来源：u/PresentEuphoric2216，来自Reddit）
Notably, such communities explicitly prohibit AI-generated content — though such works often share a similar feel of foreboding, liminal communities intentionally feature unsettling, even surreal, pictures from the actual world. In this manner, Liminalism (if we can christen this as a movement, and we should) is a form dedicated to the discovery of digital found art. It is important not just because of its content, but because it signals the migration of critical哲学 and thinking into popular discourse in a truly democratic sense, independent of the traditional confines of the art industry as expressed in exhibitions, galleries, and museums. 值得注意的是，这些社区明确禁止人工智能生成的内容——尽管此类作品通常也带有类似的预兆感，但临界社区刻意展示来自现实世界的、令人不安甚至超现实的照片。从这个意义上说，临界主义（如果我们能将其命名为一场运动，而且我们确实应该这样做）是一种致力于发现数字现成品艺术（found art）的形式。它之所以重要，不仅是因为其内容，还因为它标志着批判性哲学和思考以一种真正民主的方式迁移到了大众话语中，脱离了艺术行业在展览、画廊和博物馆中所表现出的传统束缚。
A photo of balconies that recalls the spatial disorientation of Giorgio de Chirico (photo u/MysticMind89 via Reddit) 一张让人想起乔治·德·基里科空间迷失感的阳台照片（图片来源：u/MysticMind89，来自Reddit）
Within the canon of Liminalism, there are some notable masterpieces — those 在临界主义的经典中，有一些值得注意的杰作——那些