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A Book of Mine

→DNA Series
→Prologue: A Falling Tooth (solo), Museum of Arts and Design, 2020
→Living/Distance, Make Room Gallery, 2020
→The Ground is Falling (solo), Aranya Art Center, 2021
→Seedlings and Offsprings (solo), Pioneer Works, 2023

Mixed Media InstallationA Book of Mine, of which the 900-page Volume X is one part, presents my entire genome in base pairs. Volume X contains the bases of my X chromosome. The DNA was sampled and sequenced in December 2018, and the reads were mapped to the Human X chromosome reference sequence UCSC hs38. The bases covered by my sequencing are annotated in black, and those uncovered in grey.  

I relate to DNA and astrology similarly, through a desire to seek answers about my self. And yet these questions might never be answered. When making the book, I could only do 16 pages at a time: printing the sequence on 120 feet of paper, folding it 8 times, connecting the pages with glue, and then repeating. I touched each letter and searched for what is so unique and ordinary about me. 

The folding—the walks back and forth along the long lengths of paper, tapping and brushing—became a late-night dance in my studio. 

A Book of Mine  - Volumn X

2019
Folded: 7” X 11” X 4” 
Extended: 90”X11”X5”
Prints on accordion-bound rice paper
A Book of Mine - Digital

2020
Website and genome files

With this digital commission for "Forking Piragene," A Book of Mine is now available as an online, print-on-demand publication— though printing it in its entirety is a nearly impossible task. In its sheer scale, the project illuminates the possibilities and limits of genetics as a form of self-knowledge and authorship.


Our procedure:

DNA was sampled by buccal swab with a sterile cotton tip applicator and stored on dry ice/-80 until prepped using the Qiagen DNeasy Blood and Tissue kit. A sequencing library was prepped using the Nextera DNA library prep kit and cleaned up using house-made AMPure-equivalent Serapure beads to a final average library size of ~350bp as indicated by gel. DNA was sequenced on the Illumina NextSeq 500 platform using a Mid-output 150 cycle kit with 2x84bp paired end reads, generating 130,139,348 reads passing filter. Reads were mapped to the UCSC hs38 X chromosome sequence using BowTie2, and variants were called using SAMtools/BCFtools. Bedtools was used to generate a coverage mask, and a custom python script then combined the reference chromosome, the coverage mask, and the variant file to generate the final text. Covered bases, defined as a very liberal 1x coverage depth (i.e. a single read) were annotated as black, and uncovered bases as grey. Variants with a quality <20 were not included. Heterozygous sites are shown in format [N…N/N…N]. Data was outputted as a .html file in 10megabase chunks, with per-base (or per-variant, in the case of variants) inline styling block specifying the text color, and converted to PDF format for printing using the wkhtmltopdf tool.

Credits

Collaborator: Ross McBee, Columbia University Department of Systems Biology

Photo: Haocheng Wang, Katherine Ryals, Xin Liu (process)

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Fortune Tellers 

→DNA Series
→Self Devourer (solo), Make Room Gallery, 2023

Mixed Media SculptureDNA: Deoxyribonucleic acid

When I sequenced my genome data back in 2019, I was overwhelmed by the amount of data produced from the tiny droplet of saliva: 3,117,275,501 base pairs. How can one decipher? 
Fortune Tellers Panels 
2023
24 x 8½ x 7½ in. 
60.96 x 21.59 x 19.05 cm



Self Portrait: Pesce Donna

2023
50 3/8 x 37 1/4 x 35 3/8 in. / 128.00 x 94.50 x 90.00 cm
Latex, acrylic, bronze, aluminum, and steel



An Attempt to Touch You

2023
48 x 20 7/8 x 0 3/4 in. / 122.00 x 53.00 x 2.00 cm
Latex, acrylic, glass, aluminum, and steel

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Self Devourer

→DNA Series




Make Room Gallery
Los Angeles, USA

May 25 - June 24, 2023

“To create a being out of oneself is very serious. I am creating myself. And walking in complete darkness in search of ourselves is what we do.” - Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva 

“In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.” - Wallace Stevens, Parts of the world 

The following text is written by Xin Liu.

The collection of works on view in Self Devourer at Make Room was conceived during various points of the past two years. A scattering of moments and thoughts as I, along with the world itself, entered an unfamiliar, everything-doing-just-fine mode of being and living. I sensed a hint of repression. Every moment, every tiniest decision, every bit, byte and atom, can cause the most dramatic change. Yet, we glide through life. 

All humans share 99.9% of their genetic makeup and are within 50th cousins of each other. 

“Am I Asian American to you?” I once asked a friend of mine, a second-generation Asian American himself. “No.” He explained that I was not because I did not share the same kind of upbringing which formed a crucial part of his identity. Then I asked, “How about your mother?” He paused for a few seconds, then looked directly into my eyes and said, “No, I guess she is not.” 

When I sequenced my genome in 2019, I was overwhelmed by the amount of data produced from a tiny droplet of saliva: 3,117,275,501 base pairs. How can one decipher something that large? 

There comes a point in life where one confronts their own triviality. A common story shared here: students studying abroad till their immigration, marriage and, perhaps, parenthood. I desperately, secretly, hoping to find something special, in the most literal sense, from within myself. Having my DNA tested was thrilling—a revelation of the most forbidden of secrets. 

Sometimes I feel myself falling: a drop of water falls into the ocean. The sensation of disappearing gave me a peculiar sense of calmness. I was part of it. 

To grasp this idea, I made an accordion book that could extend however long needed while allowing me to meditate in the process of printing, gluing, rubbing, and folding. It ended up being a book of about one thousand pages of the tiniest letters that I could read with bare eyes. The volume and weight of these papers were my access to the spells contained in every cell of mine. 

Several years later, when I traveled back to the US after a long trip home, I felt this unshakable disconnect with myself. I struggled to recognize and locate myself among the various identities I am constantly obtaining and losing, and often wondered in my thoughts alone in the studio: an artist, a woman, an engineer, a Chinese immigrant, an Asian American, a daughter… 

Being an artist is quite consuming. The artist has an insatiable appetite. I realized I had become this relentless creature consuming herself. I had to cut her open for examination, for reassembly, for display. She is my only material. The only thing that is mine. 

That was when I dug out those papers I had made, the extra duplicates from The Book of Mine. Somehow, as I flipped through the pages, those unreadable bytes and bits were no longer confusing. These mysterious letters presented me with an opening: a slate of meaninglessness, of intuition, of plausible translation without understanding. And so I began to sew.  

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When We Were All Flowers

→DNA Series
→Lifelike, Epoch Gallery (virtual), 2022
→Self Devourer (solo), Make Room Gallery, 2023

Digital Sculpture
Installation  When the rocket lifts off, her body falls.

In this film, we postulate a future history of rocket debris abandonment and recovery through a “hunt” for abandoned rocket debris in remote areas. The protagonist sets off across valleys and villages and into the desert in the southwest of China in a search for the debris of rockets fallen since the 1990s. She may find one, or she may never. She wonders what it would be like to be the first person to see this stone, to hear the rumblings from the sky, to shake by shivering land. Or perhaps it would come quietly, waking no one but alarmed animals. Either way, it falls as back into sleep. 

In this story, the white stone is the fallen body of a rocket. Shifting our gaze from the sky back to the ground, we reexamine the life span of technologies, marking the terrestrial death of an extraterrestrial object.


Biye Carpet

2022
200cm X 50 cm
Hand-woven wool carpet


These carpets are handcrafted by the Hotan Uygur artisans using the Senna knot weaving method, with the color-coded background of the artist's genetic sequence and the traditional pattern of pomegranate flowers in its foreground. The 129,600 knots of the carpet record the actual data of 27,047 gene base pairs by artist Xin LIU. The High-purity traditional Adelaide colors: red, yellow, green, blue, white, plus three different shades of purple, represent the genetic letter AaCcGgTt. The pomegranate flower, also known as ئانار گۈل Anar Gül, symbolizes the vigorous vitality.


This carpet series is created by Xin LIU, an artist born and raised in Karamay, Xinjiang, in collaboration with local Uygur artisans in Hotan, Xinjiang:
 تۇنىسا مەخپۇ 
رەيھانگۈل مىجىت 
روزىگۈل  ئىزىز
Digital Sculpture

2022
.FBX


In her series of inquiries on the genetic myth of personhood and community, Xin Liu visualizes her sequenced genetic code by assigning colors to the letters, AaCcGgTt. The digital sculpture in this exhibition is both a flower and a root system, signifying fertility in a hostile environment, the desert, where she grew up. It shares forms and thematic resonance with When we were flowers, a collaboration with local Uygur artisans in Hotan, Xinjiang, in which carpets were created using the Senna knot weaving method, with the color-coded background of the artist's genetic sequence and the traditional pattern of pomegranate flowers in its foreground.

This sculpture is brought to life above the “Fog Desert” biome of Biosphere 2. Viewers can stroll the network of walkways above the sand, cacti, and other desert plants, to view this gorgeous, complex, and coded body via different angles and elevations.

Neon Light Installation

2023
15 in x 70 in  
glass, argon, mercury, phosphors, metal, wire, transformers