You have seen the pictures. An empty school corridor at night. A hotel hallway with a patterned carpet running to a vanishing point. A swimming pool with no one in it. A playground under orange streetlight. They are ordinary places, and something about them is not ordinary at all.
These images are called liminal spaces. They became one of the internet's most widely shared aesthetics around 2019 and 2020, and the feeling they capture has a long history in art.
What liminal means
The word comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. Anthropologists use liminal for the middle stage of a rite of passage, when someone has left one state and not yet entered the next. A liminal space, in the literal sense, is a place of transition: a corridor, a stairwell, a waiting room, a car park, an airport lounge. You pass through it on the way to somewhere else. You are not meant to stay.
The aesthetic takes those places and shows them when they are empty.
What makes a picture liminal
- A place built for people, with no people in it. This is the essential ingredient.
- The wrong time. A shopping centre at 3am. A school in the holidays. An office on a Sunday.
- Artificial light. Fluorescent tubes, streetlamps, signs. Flat, even and slightly sickly.
- Repetition and long sightlines. Rows of doors, tiles or lights receding into the distance.
- Familiarity. The place looks like somewhere you have been, even if you can't say where.
- A slightly dated look. Often the decor of the 1980s, 1990s or 2000s, which adds a layer of memory.
Why it feels the way it does
People describe the feeling as eerie, nostalgic, lonely and peaceful, often all at once. There are a few reasons.
The place is missing its purpose. A corridor exists to be walked down. Emptied of people, it has no function, and your mind registers that something is off. It is close to the feeling called the uncanny: the familiar made strange.
It resembles memory. Childhood memories of places are often like this. You remember the school hall, the carpet, the light through the windows, and no particular person. A liminal picture looks like the inside of a memory, which is why so many people say an image feels like a place they have been in a dream.
It is quiet. For anyone worn out by noise and crowds, an empty, silent place has an appeal. The same picture can be unsettling one day and restful the next.
It is older than the internet
Artists were making pictures like this long before the term existed.
The American painter Edward Hopper built a career on it. His most famous painting shows a few figures in a brightly lit diner at night, seen from a dark, empty street. Many of his other works have no people at all: a sunlit room, a row of shopfronts in early morning, a petrol station at dusk.
The Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico painted empty town squares with long shadows, arcades and distant towers in the 1910s. They are still some of the most unsettling images of stillness ever made.
Film has used the effect for decades too: the long hotel corridors of horror cinema, the deserted city in science fiction. The internet gave the feeling a name and a place to collect examples.
Liminal space and cyberpunk
Cyberpunk cities are usually shown crowded. Take the crowd away and you get something more haunting: a street built for thousands, fully lit, with nobody on it.
Cyberpunk Slick Street is that picture. A wide city street at night runs to a vanishing point. Neon signs glow on both sides and their reflections stretch down the wet road. There is no one in sight. It has every element of a liminal space: a transit place, the wrong hour, artificial light, a long sightline, and the sense of having been somewhere like it. We look at it closely in Cyberpunk Slick Street: a closer look.
Nature has its own version. Blue Mountain Fog, with its trees dissolving into cloud, has the same quiet and the same sense of being between one place and another, without the unease.
How it relates to other aesthetics
- Vaporwave shares the empty malls and the dated decor, but treats them with irony and bright colour. See vaporwave vs synthwave vs outrun.
- Dreamcore and weirdcore push the strangeness further, adding surreal elements and text.
- Lo-fi shares the quiet and the nostalgia, and leaves out the unease. See what is lo-fi art.
- Heisei retro shares the affection for the look of the 1990s and 2000s. See what is Heisei retro.
Living with liminal art
A picture of an empty place can be a very good thing to have on a wall.
- It adds depth. Long sightlines and vanishing points make a wall feel further away. In a small room or a narrow hallway that is useful.
- It is calm. No faces, no action, nothing asking for a reaction.
- It suits a workspace. Something to look into when you look up from a screen.
- A hallway is the perfect place for it. A picture of a corridor-like street, at the end of a real corridor, extends the space and makes a quiet joke.
Choose the mood with care for a bedroom. A dark, empty street is atmospheric in a living room or a study. Some people find it unsettling last thing at night. A misty landscape gives the same stillness with a gentler feeling.
The takeaway
Liminal spaces are places of passage, caught when they are empty. They feel strange because they are missing the people they were built for, and familiar because they look like memory. Painters knew the effect a century ago. If you are drawn to pictures of quiet, empty places, you are responding to something very old. Browse the poster and canvas collections for more.