When We Were All Flowers
→Lifelike, Epoch Gallery (virtual), 2022
→Self Devourer (solo), Make Room Gallery, 2023
Installation
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.
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
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.
2023
15 in x 70 in
glass, argon, mercury, phosphors, metal, wire, transformers