As a way of examining humanity’s innate desire to sustain and to perpetuate its species, Cry:0 is a 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.
At the End of Everything is the final presentation for my residency at ArtPACE, San Antonio, in the summer of 2023.
The project delves into the nature of oil as an assertive, almost sentient resource rather than a passive substance and explores the intersection of oil, life, and death.
"Coming from a background deeply connected to petroleum exploitation in her hometown of Karamay, Xinjiang, China, Liu's residency in oil-dependent Texas further amplifies the significance of her work, with Texas leading the nation in crude oil production and refining and home to the largest petrochemical cluster in the world.”
— International artist-in-residence program, Artpace San Antonio, TX, USA
《一切的终结》深入探讨了石油不是仅仅被挖掘的资源,而是作为一种具有自我意识的、几乎有感知的生命形态,它处于生命和死亡的交叉点。
“刘的家乡中国新疆克拉玛依市因石油开采而建成,她在依赖石油的德克萨斯州的驻地项目中进一步放大了石油在她创作中的影响:德克萨斯州在原油生产和炼油方面处于全美国领先地位,也是美国石油公司的所在地和全球最大的石化产业集群。”
—— 美国德克萨斯州圣安多尼奥Artpace,国际艺术家驻地项目
Living Distance is a fantasy and a mission, in which a wisdom tooth is sent to outer space and back down to Earth again. Carried by a crystalline robotic sculpture called EBIFA, the tooth becomes a newborn entity in outer space. Its performance is about death, body and home, in a world where our science exploration and spiritual journeys are diverging.
When the rocket lifts off, her body falls.
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 if back into a 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.
The pandemic has overturned daily life and registered new spatial and temporal positions in our confined domestic spaces. Adrift, suddenly without bearings, Liu locates herself in images received by radio from passing NOAA weather satellites. The images are continuously broadcasted to Earth via the Automatic Picture Transmission (APT) system. When the satellites pass overhead, their transmissions can be received on the ground. Translated from radio into sound as the signals are received, each line of the image can be heard as a ping, its consistent, musical tempo a distinctive feature of the FM broadcast. Liu and her partner Gershon Dublon have practiced receiving the images in their Brooklyn backyard since April 2020, sweeping an antenna fashioned from a broomstick and coat hanger wire across the sky. The noise and glitches in the images were caused by them sometimes missing the direction of a satellite, or a nearby building getting in the way of the horizon. Each image received was uniquely captured over the ten to fifteen minutes when one of the satellites was in a direct line-of-sight to the artist.
The Earth Is an Image is a web-based work created by artist and engineer Xin Liu exploring the orbital coverage of artificial satellites that are used for geo-imaging, weather forecasting, and related technologies. Proposing a post-anthropocentric view, Liu tunes into the minds of several satellites that have been abandoned in orbit at the end of their missions.
NOAA
A commission by BMW at Westbund Shanghai 2023.
Artist Xin Liu has been tracking several decommissioned satellites, “NOAA”, drifting in space since 2020. She reinterprets the received data into audile signals and images to communicate with them. Like the thought experiments in Valentino Braitenberg’s Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, these vehicles slowly came to embody love, logic, manifestations of foresight, creative thinking, personality, and free will in the eyes of the artist. In this BWM commission, the artist imagined a cosmic dance of countless orbiting vehicles in her dazzling installation.
艺术家刘昕自2020年来开始追寻着数颗漂流在太空中的退役卫星“NOAA”,并将接收信号转化为音频和影像来与它们交流。如同心理学家瓦伦蒂诺·布瑞滕堡在《工具:合成心理学实验》的思想实验一般,这些机器在艺术家这里慢慢获得了情感和意义,展现出了爱、远见以及创造性。在她这次BMW令人眼花缭乱的委任装置里,艺术家想象了它们在太空无人之地的一场狂舞。它们彼此链接起来,发出讯号,沿着轨迹相互追逐,以此作为艺术家对BMW未来出行探索的浪漫式回应。
A planetary-scale peripheral nervous system for dream states
Does the Earth dream? Can our dreams mesh?
In dreams we become free of the unrelenting coherence that waking life imposes, free to sink into the swamps of planetary perception. In the Wandering Mind, our planet meets us in our sleep, filtered through global networks of sound and artificial intelligence.
The project draws its source material from a global repository of more than 50,000 user-submitted field recordings called Radio Aporee, chopping and reassembling them into one continuous journey. For this premiere, we selected sounds from 2020 to listen, wander, and reflect in this global time of crisis.
"MicroPET" mission consists of an autonomous payload for enzymatic reactions and microbial cultivation with fully programmable serial passaging and sample preservation. The payload is a compact, modular bioreactor system that allows for automatic media transfers and precise data monitoring from integrated sensors (e.g., temperature, optical density, etc.). We apply this system to study the biological upcycling of the commonly used polymer poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) in space in a two-step system in which PET film is enzymatically degraded and microbially upcycled.
Sojourner2020, the first international art open call that took a trip to International Space Station this March.
Sojourner 2020 is created by an unprecedented collection of international artists, bringing in knowledge from indigenous groups, queer communities, and diverse cultures, as well as transdisciplinary perspectives.
DNA: Deoxyribonucleic acid
When I sequenced my genome data back in 2019, I was overwhelmed by the amount of data produced from the tiny droplet of saliva: 3,117,275,501 base pairs. How can one decipher?
Lycorises is a series of generative artworks inspired by Ernst Haeckel‘s illuminating illustrations on biological evolutions. Combining the visual language of microscopic organisms and flowers, the Lycorises artworks aim to represent the intricacies of life and how it constantly evolves.
Through the use of generative algorithms, the artworks can constantly create new, unique floral-like forms. Each color palette reflects the unique structure of Lycorises specifically evolved in its environments, including the volcano, alien desert, or cyberspace. These environments encouraged the growth of characteristic features, such as spikes, feathers, and leaves, that protect the Lycoris seed.
Unearthing Futures is a collaborative project initiated by Xin Liu and Lucia Monge. to decolonize narratives of planetary futures through growing, shaping, and sharing potatoes.
Aluminum, cooling unit, water from the air, wood (metal & water) | Carbonized cedar wood, wood (wood & fire)
Background: satellite map of Xinjiang.
fa·ci·es
Dictionary result for facies /ˈfāSHēz,ˈfāSHēˌēz/
noun
1.
MEDICINE
the appearance or facial expression of an individual that is typical of a particular disease or condition.
"adenoidal facies are characterized by an open mouth gape"
2.
GEOLOGY
the character of a rock expressed by its formation, composition, and fossil content.
"a sedimentary investigation of the area led to the postulation of five distinct facies"
(metal & water)
The bronze casting mouth is cooled down to about minus 4~5 degrees Celsius which condensates water in the air on its surface and creates a layer of frost.
(wood & fire)
The cedar wood mouth is curved by hand and then burnt with fire torch.
2019
3D printed ceramics, steel, glass
3”X 11”X 4”
Prints on accordion-bound rice paper
2019
A Book of Mine, of which the 900-page Volume X is one part, presents my entire genome in base pairs. Volume X contains the bases of my X chromosome. The DNA was sampled and sequenced in December 2018, and the reads were mapped to the Human X chromosome reference sequence UCSC hs38. The bases covered by my sequencing are annotated in black, and those uncovered in grey.
falling
2019
Media/material:
aluminum, steel, glass
aluminum, steel, resin, glass
Size: 3”X6”X52”
3D printed resin, borosilicate glass, human tooth, steel, wood panel
If we mistake the deep ocean for empty, it is only because its fullness is just beyond the limits of our eyes. Home is a thin membrane above sea level and under the atmosphere. When we fly into space or dive to the ocean floor, the fabric of spacetime folds us into one darkness. Where ocean and outer space connect, we meet Mollastica.
Collaborating with fashion designer Yao Yu, Xin Liu creates a molluscs costume of Mollastica which “swallows” strips of cloth made from Parley’s ocean plastic® yarn.
5 min performance in zero gravity and underwater photographyDevice: Aluminum, 3D prints from Formlab, magnet, Nylon string, motors and electronics
2018
Performance
Device: glass, wood, copper, sand
2014
A collaboration with Nini Dongnier
移步上升,下降为人
创作这支舞的过程里,渐渐演化出这样一个线索,也是作品的内在结构:
I. 地、筑建、低空、天和地颠倒——在分不清是植物、矿物、动物还是人的时候,一团混合的生命体从泥土中摆脱重力,在土地之上筑建结构,十分缓慢和绵长的过程;试着将天和地颠倒过来,最终还是回到一步步的生长。
II. 生成规则和秩序、抽象秩序的具体化:由折叠、环绕、牵引、直角、圆形,到分离、奔跑、个体与个体的关联,在无序中始终有显要的规则… …
III. 一整个不可分割的动作——一幅绵延的环形壁画、每一步都是上升、都是仪式。
IV. 身体的重力的感受的具体化;安静的重置、确认自身在自然中、空间中、进化的时间坐标中的位置。
这些不是阐释,是在和演员工作的过程中的实际对话。
身体是最当下的材料,同时它携带着过往生物衍进的结果,每一步都无法跳过;
身体本身就是一种精妙和复合的媒材;
如上,我为身体知觉所拥有的古老的也是当下的记忆赋形。
但是,说一千道一万,终究还是直接面对四个身体、一个场域、一段时间,处置体积、重量、身体细部、感官,这么一件基本的事。
这是一个舞蹈,也是一个移动的雕塑,整个环境是雕塑,每一个物都在舞蹈。
东妮尔 9/18/2021
2019
Glass, metal, resin, LED lights, plasma, transformers
Dimension variable
2019
wood, acrylic paint, acrylic, brass, 3D printed resin, gold leaf, copper
13” X 17” X 4”
artificial tear:purified water, salt, protein (lactoferrin and lysozyme), carboxymethyl cellulose and sugar.wood, glass, electronics, pumps
2015
Sleepwalk is a solitary adventure game in which you find yourself confined to your apartment in New York City under quarantine. Information about the outside world comes to you through the news, and sometimes filters in through your window. As the days pass, you start to wonder whether this is all a dream.
Sleepwalk was built in 120 hours in Spring 2020, during which time the artist was living and working in her apartment under COVID-19 self-isolation orders by the State of New York. The game is the artist’s response to a prompt from the Onassis ENTER program.