Self Devourer
Los Angeles, USA
May 25 - June 24, 2023
“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.
Seedlings and Offsprings
→Living Distance
New York, USA
July 7 - September 10, 2023
As a way of looking into humanity’s innate desire to sustain and to perpetuate its species, Xin has created a new series of mixed-media sculptures inspired by biological and medical innovations such as cryonics and egg freezing, each designed to interfere with natural life cycles. Embedded with a cooling mechanism that causes thin layers of frost to appear on its surface, the works also reference scientists’ research into subglacial lakes in Antarctica and ice-covered oceans deep beneath the surface of moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, where probing devices search for traces of life from ancient and unknown worlds.
Another component of the exhibition is Living Distance (2019-2020), a three-part project comprising a performance conducted in outer space, a two-channel video installation, and a virtual reality experience. Partially realized during Xin’s residency at Pioneer Works, the series centers on the fantastical journey of her wisdom tooth, which traveled aboard the International Space Station before returning to Earth. Carried by a crystalline robotic sculpture engineered by the artist, the tooth metaphorically becomes a newborn entity as it enters an infinite darkness. While the video installation mixes documentary footage with dreamlike imagery of Xin’s performance, the virtual reality component allows viewers to experience the tooth’s journey from a first-hand perspective.
The artist, together with collaborator Lucia Monge, similarly sent potato seeds into Earth’s lower orbit in March 2020, initiating a series titled Unearthing Futures (2020-ongoing). Even though more than four thousand varieties of the root vegetables exist in the world, only eight types are grown commercially in the United States, and only one has been selected by the Chinese National Space Administration to be cultivated in miniature ecosystems sent to the moon.
Conceived as a response to the rise of homogeneity both in agriculture and in politics, Xin and Monge’s project casts potatoes as subjects that call for a diversified imagination of what the future can look like, particularly for space exploration in non-colonial terms. A selection of these spacefaring potatoes will be grown and harvested in Pioneer Works’s garden, where the outdoor installation will give way to a dynamic host of educational programming.
The exhibition also lays a thematic framework for a new iteration of Scientific Controversies, a programming series that brings creative minds together to celebrate the passionate spirit of scientific curiosity. Hosted by Pioneer Works Director of Science Janna Levin, the conversation will center on the topic of space colonization, and feature geneticist Christopher Mason, whose book The Next 500 Years proposes a ten-phase program that would engineer the genome so that humans can tolerate the extreme environments of outer space—with the ultimate goal of achieving human settlement of new solar systems.
Xin Liu: Seedlings and Offsprings was supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Living/Distance
→A Book of Mine
→Teratoma and the other bodies Series
Los Angeles, USA
December 12, 2019 - February 1, 2020
— Xin Liu
Prologue: A Falling Tooth
→Orbit Weaver
→DNA Series: A book of Mine
New York, USA
January 25 - May 5, 2019
From the curator:
Initially trained as a mechanical engineer, Liu thinks of science as her first language and uses this vernacular to tease out artistic nuance alongside scientific precision. Utilizing media that might be perceived as lacking in poetry, Liu presents deeply personal reflections.
Through the lens of space exploration, genetics, and geology, Xin Liu: Fellow Focus gazes both inward and into the Earth’s orbit, offering a self-portrait as expansive as it is intimate
The Ground is Falling
→Sojourner2020
→Living Distance
→The White Stone and Debris Series
→Ground Station Series
Qinghuangdao, China
September 25, 2021 - January 6, 2022
In a sense, we seem to have completed not only the continuous metaphysical engineering project that is “the world as a sphere” (Yuk), but also the physical civilizational expansion that has followed the curve of that sphere. Over the last half-century, we have already witnessed the overview effect, symbolized by the blue dot, and seen the full reflection that Buckminster Fuller projected onto the Earth’s spherical structure. Perhaps now we ought to consider what lies beyond the overview and the blue dot—a planetary existence that can no longer be fully described as “spherical” and can no longer be limited by a vision of what’s out there. To some extent, the “outside” could disappear at any moment.
While Blue Origin and SpaceX have driven interest in human spaceflight, and even sparked bold statements about a new Space Age, precision cosmology has explored dark matter sitting silently in the void. In the deep space narrative, the flames of rocket boosters and high-energy cosmic rays entangle the obvious and the hidden, the surface and the interior. The exhibition attempts to explore a non-vertical, topological perspective towards the universe. In her long-term projects, Xin Liu has situated herself on the boundary line between celestial objects, experiences of deep space, the cosmic ecosystem, and many other topics, as well as within continuous translations of vocabularies from multiple disciplines. Within this exhibition, Liu retains her usual working methods developed around mapping, modeling, and precision instruments, and also constructs three narrative threads that run through the exhibition space: a potato seed that was transported to the International Space Station via manned space flight, an anonymous “white stone” from the sky, and a series of satellite signals radiating between the Earth’s orbit and surface. They all seem to be in motion: the instruments are rotating, the potato is sprouting, and the fallen object is rumbling. The pieces of technology, plants, debris, soil, shadows, and humans that appear in the exhibition seem to be governed by an unspoken, overarching rule, regardless of whether this can be called “the cosmos.” This invisible, overarching energy has more primitive associations and unfolds in a spiral circumscribing the exhibition’s verticality.
Flying above the ground could mean taking an expedition, or it could imply going into exile, while falling into the Earth’s core could be a return to orbit. The one-way vertical universe is confronting an epistemological reorganization. Beyond the upper bounds of engineering and the limits of mechanics, the political, technological, and cultural power projected into space constructs another kind of deep time that extends into deep space. It forces us to reconsider everything that we have inscribed or woven: people, fragments, signals, space minerals, and various suppositions and deductions in space. The dimension and speed of deep space narratives are being gradually dissolved into more diverse, poetic, entangled, and internalized forms, which may allow cosmic engineering and cosmic metabolism to achieve henosis (oneness). What the exhibition projects is simply one version of many potential narratives; it is condensed into a specific deep space that one human body is narrating. Here, the whole world falls straight down.
curated by Iris Long
text by Iris Long
text by Iris Long
Supassing r=a(1-sinθ)
Beijing, China
September 1 - October 14, 2018
Curatorial text:
I. 短暂平衡
不仅是“诗人”，还是“少女诗人” 的小冰出版了诗集（并开放版权）；程序已经能写出重金属专辑（《Coditany of Timeness》）和模仿Lichtenstein 的作品风格；外形怪怖的Debater在与人类的辩论中获得了更多票数；各种智能助手（Siri, Cortana, Alexa），和Google Brain团队给神经网络加密算法的命名方式（Alice/Bob/Eve）都具有人性色彩。我们似乎在人与机器之间漫长的相处模式演化中，找到了一种短暂的、带有诗意的动态平衡，通过对技术的艺术性解释与场景建设，弥合着硬核技术与大众阅读语境的裂隙。
II. 元领地
技术与艺术对这一暧昧地带的双向逼近也似乎允许了一种元领地的存在，以涵纳非功能导向的、游戏性和故事性的创造。设想一个展览，从这种动态平衡出发，并采取一种相对柔和的向度：它试图处理科技与艺术的议题，但并不架设任何优先级；没有裸露在外的电路板，也不呈现“科技”原材料；不立足科学的圈地自萌，也不鼓励对艺术的盲目崇拜。
III. 阿派朗
阿那克西曼德在米利都派的年代就设想过世界不同种类的物质都来自被称之为“阿派朗”（apeiron，意为“无限定”）的最简成分。这种最简成分在今天成为数据，化身为大多数人知识外的一片飞地，钝化在冰冷的运算结构之间。当科技能以更精准的方式对时空、环境乃至人的精神世界进行测量与统计时，原本用于信息与机械过程的测试、量化与排序逻辑漫出到更多交叉领域，在产生过度简化倾向的同时，也默许了数据威权和新阶级的诞生，人的尺度正在重新被审视甚至无处安放。
IV. 那一个词
发生在上述“元领地”中的诗性转换，以及人类与技术对象的反复磨合，不仅仅是开篇所述之“硬核技术与大众阅读语境的裂隙”的工具，也是一块置空的场所，一种tabula rasa，为计算机时代的超速现实提供一种达达式的向度——它无关于创造任何“奇观”。正如福楼拜所言：“不论一个作家所要描写的东西是什么，只有一个名词可供他使用，只有一个动词能使对象生动，只有一个形容词能使对象的性质鲜明。因此就得用心去寻找，直至找到那一个名词、那一个动词和那一个形容词。”
V. 展览
计划做一个展览，视为寻求这一个词语的尝试。
A glitch in the stars
Linz, Austria
September 6 - September 10, 2018
In 1990, from 6 million kilometers away, Voyager 1 took a snapshot of our existence in the universe: a pale blue dot. In it, we saw the loneliness and impermanence of our species, a realization that continues to sustain a thriving, resonating call for the future. However, Space is not for humans. We are never meant to be there, an error in the wild. The isolation, lack of gravity, radiation and all the risks there can kill us in minutes.
What is human experience beyond the earthbound? Here, six projects form the Space Exploration Initiative of MIT Media Lab are asking the same question and bringing possibilities to the toughest, impossible space:
A musical instrument that only plays in zero-gravity, pneumatic surface that morphs to embrace the human body in zero-g, self-assembly infrastructure for the next generation of zero gravity habitats, spider-like performance with the three-dimensional movements of a weightless body, scents that capture the memories of our homeland and a grappler for landing foundational infrastructure on an asteroid.
All the projects were successfully deployed and performed in a zero-gravity parabolic flight last year. They are hopes beyond solutions, imaginations more than facts. Just like generations of observers, they see our future in the stars.
Seedings and Offsprings
→Living Distance
New York, USA
July 7 - September 10, 2023
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.