The Permanent and the Insatiable
S+T+ARTS Prize 2025 Nomination
Falling Walls Finalists 2025: Art & Science
Selected Press:
Frieze | With Plastic-Eating Enzymes, Xin Liu Critiques Consumerism
Mousse | Xin Liu “The Permanent and the Insatiable” at Management, New York
MOLD | Plastic Time - Modeling Decay with Artist Xin Liu
RICE University | Can plastics be defeated? New installation at the Moody puts science to the test
2025
Post-consumer PET and PET filament, PET-degrading enzyme and chemical solution, Aluminum, Acrylic, Stirring and heating system, Aquarium
59” X 24” X 24”
“Materials science seems to operate within two mythic extremes…synthetic materials designed to be so resistant and indestructible that they verge on a kind of supernatural longevity and engineered biomaterials, such as enzymes or microbes, designed to consume precisely these sorts of super-resistant materials. … pulled back and forth between two supernatural ideals: there is that which resists to the point of uncanny permanence, of eerie immortality, and there is that which consumes to the point of universal insatiability, of boundless hunger.”
— Fables of the Permanent and the Insatiable, by Geoff Manaugh in 2018
In 2018, Xin Liu initiated and led research project MicroPET: developing a modular bioreactor for a plastic degradation payload at the International Space Station (ISS). It is an autonomous payload for enzymatic reactions and microbial cultivation with fully programmable serial passaging and sample preservation, developed in collaboration with MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Weill Cornell Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Seed Health. The team successfully conducted the payload experiment in the International Space Station in December 2022. The project is recognized as one of The Best Inventions of 2023 in TIME magazine and has been accepted into Nature Partner Journal Microgravity. The research work seeded the conceptual and technical development of The Permanent and the Insatiable.
The research work seeded the conceptual and technical development of The Permanent and the Insatiable.
Our work producing the enzyme at Rice University for the Moody installation is capture by the team on campus
Documentation of before and post degradation of woven sections from Houston’s cityscape model.
All PET plastic materials come from everyday urban necessities, including olive oil bottles, salad containers, shampoo bottles, and countless drink bottles. Materials used in the project were all contributed by members of Xin Liu Studio in London.