Xin Liu's Inward Expeditions

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Nimbly combining the tools of art and science, artist Xin Liu expresses what it means to be human through a diverse body of work that includes frost-coated sculptures, a bubbling fountain of crude oil, and a performance in outer space. At her Artpace San Antonio residency, Liu solders wires and shapes glass for a new sculpture inspired by her hometown of Karamay in northwestern China, a city developed by the Chinese government because of its proximity to oil deposits. Recalling how the oil industry was celebrated in Karamay, Liu created At the End of Everything (2023), a glass droplet of crude oil suspended above a bubbling fountain of the same dark, viscous material. “I wanted to have this motion inside the oil pan giving this sentient existence,” says the artist. “It’s not just a passive material to be extracted. It’s a living being beneath the Earth’s crust and transforming the world above it with terror and lots of violence.” 

As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the artist developed a robot to carry her extracted wisdom tooth into space on the International Space Station. The research project and performance are documented in Liu’s two-channel video Living Distance (2019–2020), which combines performance documentation with footage of Liu here on Earth and a poetic narration that ruminates on the journey and the transformation it enacts. “We are imagining all these versions of futures—living on another planet or living with AI,” says Liu. “But I feel like, as you’re leaving your current place, some part of yourself dies and sheds away. There is this inevitable death that happens along with growth.” 

In a new body of sculptures exhibited at Pioneer Works in New York City, the artist considers her fears around having her eggs frozen, creating warped, skeletal, frost-covered sculptures that propose a human body transformed through a cryogenic process. Through art, Liu centers the human experience in the face of technologies and developments motivated by efficiency, productivity, and optimization. “In this calibrated and measured world,” says Liu, “art allows beauty and emotions to be part of the experience.”

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