At designer-artist Liang Mingyu's solo exhibition at Liuzhou Industrial Museum in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, a 10-meter-long installation commands the hall, its striking red covering the entire space in a bloody hue.

Titled Ocean, the installation comprises a gigantic whale shark and its young, both constructed with steel frames and red denim, and draped in many plastic ropes, data cables and textiles. Above them is a hollow sphere made of red plastic trash bags, threatening to enmesh the creatures.

"The bloody red seems to have been drawn directly from the body. The artist drags it and compresses it over and over without any mercy, until it becomes pieces of wrinkled skin," Zou You, vice-president of the China Fashion Association, writes after viewing the piece.

"Standing before it, I suddenly felt my inner self turned outward. The shame, tremors, and unhealed scars usually hidden beneath the skin are now all laid bare."

The exhibition, Life Ecology Vitality, runs from July 25 to Oct 25, and showcases the large-scale installation works of Liang Mingyu, a fashion designer, contemporary artist and professor at Southwest University in Chongqing.