The Permanent and the Insatiable: Houston
For The Permanent and the Insatiable, commissioned by the Moody Center for the Arts, Liu has placed a dissolving cityscape made of PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) plastics, modelled after the Rice Campus and downtown Houston, inside a bioreactor tank. Throughout the exhibition, an enzymic reaction slowly degrades the plastic sculpture. Investigating the tension between seemingly indestructible materials such as plastics, and synthetic bioorganisms designed to consume them, Liu imagines a world where metropolitan cities with an excess of manmade materials are confronted by the appetites of natural microbes.
2025
Sculpture
59 X 24 X 24 inches
150 X 60 X 60 cm
Post-consumer PET and PET filament, PET-degrading enzyme and chemical solution, Aluminum, Acrylic, Stirring and heating system, Aquarium
“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 Insatiable, by Geoff Manaugh in 2018In 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 ISS in Dec 2022 and has submitted our results to Nature Microgravity for journal review. The project is recognized as one of The Best Inventions of 2023 in TIME magazine.
The research work seeded the conceptual and technical development of The Permanent and the Insatiable.
Learn More
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 contributed by members of Xin Liu Studio London.
Credits
Collaborator: Erika Erickson
Model fabricator: Shijia Huang, Thanya Tham
Artist Assistant: Jeremy Siyang Chen
Supported by: Moody Center of the Arts
Collaborator: Erika Erickson
Model fabricator: Shijia Huang, Thanya Tham
Artist Assistant: Jeremy Siyang Chen
Supported by: Moody Center of the Arts