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The Map: Karamay


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Exhaust

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
Turin, Italy

April 15 - October 11, 2026A large, floor-spilling tapestry maps the artist’s hometown of Xinjiang as a living terrain shaped by metabolism, erosion, and time. Presented in a partially post-degraded yet fully cleaned state, it preserves the trace of decay without allowing further change.

Growing up in a resource-dependent oil town, Liu’s sense of home and city has been continually shaped by the impermanence of the materials on which the city depends. During the trip in search of rocket debris, Liu and her crew encountered another oil town in Qinghai, called Leng Hu Zhen (冷湖镇), in a state of near abandonment. Its desolation mirrored what she understands as the inevitable future of her own hometown.

The work is made using Vivomer, a bioplastic made from waste biomass by Shellworks.










The Map: Karamay

 2026

Weaved and post degraded vivomer sheets, threads, bondina, polyester, cotton

6000 x 2140mm



The Lab





Exhaust

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
Turin, Italy

April 15 - October 11, 2026
The technical room of the gallery is staged as a lab space, functioning as the project’s working archive: a constellation of research texts, diagrams, field images, and references tracing the tapestry’s conceptual roots in metabolism, erosion, and monumentality. Work-in-progress maquettes and material tests reveal decisions around weaving experiments with the characteristics of the vivomer material. At the center, a sealed transparent display stages a material prototype degrading in soil, in real time. Together, these materials shift the attention from the exhibited work towards a continuous inquiry with decay and temporality.

















The Lab
2026

Weaved and degraded vivomer samples, polaroids,  sketches, printed documentation and articles. 










Credits

Production: Shijia Huang
Project Manager: Sórcha Bradford
Artist Assistant: Yingtong Lin