January 20 – February 25, 2024
Gleaming Bodies 2024
Xin LIU creates an immersive exhibition space resembling a womb-like environment. It references the female womb as a cosmic creator, contemplating the perpetuation of life and the fantastical possibilities that technology may offer beyond human existence. Central to the room, which has illuminated white floors that glow from beneath, sits a piece titled The Mothership that explores humanity’s inherent drive to sustain and propagate our species. The work is inspired by biological and medical innovations such as cryonics and egg freezing, as well as seed banks [A1] where seeds are stored to preserve genetic diversity for the future. Within the piece, a cooling mechanism is incorporated, causing a delicate layer of frost to emerge on its surface. This element references scientific research conducted in subglacial lakes in Antarctica and the ice-covered oceans of Jupiter and Saturn’s moons, where exploratory instruments search for signs of ancient and enigmatic life forms.
シン・リウ
没入型の展示空間で構成されたシン・リウの《Gleaming Bodies(かすかにきらめく身体)》は、女性の子宮を宇宙の創造源として捉え、生命の永続性や、テクノロジーがもたらす人智を超えた可能性を考察しています。白い床が下から光を放つ部屋の中央に置かれた《The Mothership》は、人類が生来持っている「種を維持し繁殖させる」という願望を探究するもので、人体の冷凍保存や卵子凍結といった生物学的・医学的な技術革新や、多様な遺伝子を未来に残すことを目的にした精子バンクに着想を得ています。また、表面に薄い霜の層をつくる冷却装置を組み込んでおり、南極大陸の氷河湖や、木星や土星を周回する衛星にある氷に覆われた海の未知なる生命体の探究にもつながります。
July 7 - September 10, 2023
Seedlings and Offsprings is an exhibition that brings together a selection of artist-in-residence alumni Xin Liu’s recent and ongoing projects. Comprising sculptures, video, virtual reality, and an outdoor installation, the presentation expands upon the artist’s explorations into space travel, vitality, mutation, and immortality.
As a way of looking into humanity’s innate desire to sustain and to perpetuate its species, Xin has created a new 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.
Another component of the exhibition is Living Distance (2019-2020), a three-part project comprising a performance conducted in outer space, a two-channel video installation, and a virtual reality experience. Partially realized during Xin’s residency at Pioneer Works, the series centers on the fantastical journey of her wisdom tooth, which traveled aboard the International Space Station before returning to Earth. Carried by a crystalline robotic sculpture engineered by the artist, the tooth metaphorically becomes a newborn entity as it enters an infinite darkness. While the video installation mixes documentary footage with dreamlike imagery of Xin’s performance, the virtual reality component allows viewers to experience the tooth’s journey from a first-hand perspective.
The artist, together with collaborator Lucia Monge, similarly sent potato seeds into Earth’s lower orbit in March 2020, initiating a series titled Unearthing Futures (2020-ongoing). Even though more than four thousand varieties of the root vegetables exist in the world, only eight types are grown commercially in the United States, and only one has been selected by the Chinese National Space Administration to be cultivated in miniature ecosystems sent to the moon.
Conceived as a response to the rise of homogeneity both in agriculture and in politics, Xin and Monge’s project casts potatoes as subjects that call for a diversified imagination of what the future can look like, particularly for space exploration in non-colonial terms. A selection of these spacefaring potatoes will be grown and harvested in Pioneer Works’s garden, where the outdoor installation will give way to a dynamic host of educational programming.
The exhibition also lays a thematic framework for a new iteration of Scientific Controversies, a programming series that brings creative minds together to celebrate the passionate spirit of scientific curiosity. Hosted by Pioneer Works Director of Science Janna Levin, the conversation will center on the topic of space colonization, and feature geneticist Christopher Mason, whose book The Next 500 Years proposes a ten-phase program that would engineer the genome so that humans can tolerate the extreme environments of outer space—with the ultimate goal of achieving human settlement of new solar systems.
Xin Liu: Seedlings and Offsprings was supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
2023年7月7日—9月10日
《幼苗和后裔》展出驻留艺术家刘昕的最新项目。该展览由雕塑、视频、虚拟实境和户外装置等组成,表现了艺术家对太空旅行、生命力、变异和不朽等命题的探求。
永续生命是人类与生俱来的愿望,艺术家创作了一系列混合媒体雕塑,其灵感来自于如冷冻术和冻卵技术等生物科学和创新医学,每一个都是对自然的生命循环的人工干预。作品嵌入一种冷却机制,使作品表面呈现薄薄的冰霜。这些作品亦参考科学家对南极洲冰川下的湖泊研究,以及环木星和土星及其卫星地表下的冰海研究,在那里,探测设备正寻找着来自古老和未知世界的生命痕迹。
展览的另一个部分是《脱离》(2019-2020),一个由三部分组成的项目:在外太空进行的表演、一个双频影像装置,以及一个虚拟实境体验。该系列的部分作品是艺术家在先锋艺术中心的驻留期间创作的,围绕她的智齿的奇幻之旅展开,该智齿曾被送往国际空间站并返回地球。由刘昕制作的晶体机器人携带,这颗牙齿被送入无限的黑暗中,隐喻了一个新生的实体的诞生。影像装置混合镜头和艺术家的梦幻表演,观众将从虚拟实境体的第一视角体验智齿的旅程。
艺术家与合作者露西娅·蒙吉 (Lucia Monge)一起,在2020年3月将土豆种子送入近地轨道,开启了一个名为《挖掘未来》(2020始,进行中)的系列。尽管世界上有四千多种根茎类蔬菜,但只有八种在美国进行商业化种植,而且只有一种被中国国家航天局选中,被送入月球的微型生态系统中进行培育。作为对农业和政治中同质化现象的回应,刘昕和蒙吉的项目将土豆作为主题,呼吁对未来的进行更多样化的想象,鼓励去殖民化空间探索。先锋艺术中心的花园里将种植和收割一部分航天培育土豆,并由户外装置起开发一系列教学项目。
该展览还为《科学论坛》的全新版本奠定了主题框架,这是一个汇集创意思维以庆祝对科学的好奇与热情的系列栏目。由先锋艺术中心科学部主任扬纳·莱文 (Janna Levi) 主持,对话将以太空殖民为主题,由遗传学家克里斯托弗·梅森 (Christopher Mason) 主讲。他的书《未来500年》提出了一个十阶段计划,该计划将改造基因组,使人类能够忍受外太空的极端环境以便实现人类在新太阳系的定居。
《刘昕:幼苗和后裔》由纽约市文化事务局与市议会合作的公共资金支持,并受到州长办公室和纽约州立法机构下的纽约州艺术委员会支持。
“To create a being out of oneself is very serious. I am creating myself. And walking in complete darkness in search of ourselves is what we do.” - Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
“In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.” - Wallace Stevens, Parts of the world
The following text is written by Xin Liu.
The collection of works on view in Self Devourer at Make Room was conceived during various points of the past two years. A scattering of moments and thoughts as I, along with the world itself, entered an unfamiliar, everything-doing-just-fine mode of being and living. I sensed a hint of repression. Every moment, every tiniest decision, every bit, byte and atom, can cause the most dramatic change. Yet, we glide through life.
All humans share 99.9% of their genetic makeup and are within 50th cousins of each other.
“Am I Asian American to you?” I once asked a friend of mine, a second-generation Asian American himself. “No.” He explained that I was not because I did not share the same kind of upbringing which formed a crucial part of his identity. Then I asked, “How about your mother?” He paused for a few seconds, then looked directly into my eyes and said, “No, I guess she is not.”
When I sequenced my genome in 2019, I was overwhelmed by the amount of data produced from a tiny droplet of saliva: 3,117,275,501 base pairs. How can one decipher something that large?
There comes a point in life where one confronts their own triviality. A common story shared here: students studying abroad till their immigration, marriage and, perhaps, parenthood. I desperately, secretly, hoping to find something special, in the most literal sense, from within myself. Having my DNA tested was thrilling—a revelation of the most forbidden of secrets.
Sometimes I feel myself falling: a drop of water falls into the ocean. The sensation of disappearing gave me a peculiar sense of calmness. I was part of it.
To grasp this idea, I made an accordion book that could extend however long needed while allowing me to meditate in the process of printing, gluing, rubbing, and folding. It ended up being a book of about one thousand pages of the tiniest letters that I could read with bare eyes. The volume and weight of these papers were my access to the spells contained in every cell of mine.
Several years later, when I traveled back to the US after a long trip home, I felt this unshakable disconnect with myself. I struggled to recognize and locate myself among the various identities I am constantly obtaining and losing, and often wondered in my thoughts alone in the studio: an artist, a woman, an engineer, a Chinese immigrant, an Asian American, a daughter…
Being an artist is quite consuming. The artist has an insatiable appetite. I realized I had become this relentless creature consuming herself. I had to cut her open for examination, for reassembly, for display. She is my only material. The only thing that is mine.
That was when I dug out those papers I had made, the extra duplicates from The Book of Mine. Somehow, as I flipped through the pages, those unreadable bytes and bits were no longer confusing. These mysterious letters presented me with an opening: a slate of meaninglessness, of intuition, of plausible translation without understanding. And so I began to sew.
自⻝者
2023.05.25 - 2023.06.24
我在Make Room空间的展览《自食者》中所展示的作品系列, 来自于过去两年许多零散的时刻。我和世界本身共同进入了一个陌生的、“一切都很好”的生活状态。但我知道,在这样压抑的空间里,每个微小的决定,每一比特、字节与原子都可以引起最剧烈的变化。
Yet, we glide through life.
所有人类都共享着99.9%的基因组成,都是彼此间50代以内的表亲。
“对你来说,我是亚裔美国人吗?” 我曾问过我的一位朋友,他自己是二代亚裔美国人。“不是。” 他解释道,我不是,因为我没有与他相似的成长背景,而这是组成他身份的重要部分之一。随后我问:“那你的母亲呢?” 他停顿了几秒,然后直视我的眼睛并说:“不,我想她不是。”
当我在2019年对我的基因组进行测序时,我被从一滴唾液产生的大量数据所震撼:3,117,275,501个碱基对。一个人要如何解读如此庞大的数据?
生命中总会有一个时刻,人需要面对自己的微不足道。
一个常见的故事:出国留学直到移民、结婚,也许还会为人父母。我渴望着从自己内心找到一些特别的东西,近乎直接粗暴检测基因是令人兴奋的——这是对最禁忌的秘密的揭示。
但结果平平无奇。
有时候,我感到自己在坠落:一滴水落入海洋。消失的感觉给我一种奇特的宁静感。我是它的一部分。
为了更好地理解这种感觉,我制作了一本手风琴式的书。这本书可以随着需要而延长,同时也让我在印刷、粘贴、摩擦和折叠的过程中有时间反思。这最终变成了一本有一千页的书,其中的字母是我肉眼能够识别的最小字母。这些纸的厚度和重量是我接触我每个细胞中包含的密码的方式。
几年后,当我在一次漫长的回家之旅后回到美国,我感受到了我与自我之间不可动摇的分离感,我在不断获取和失去的各种身份中努力找寻和定位自我。我经常独自在工作室中游走,思绪万千:我是一名艺术家,一个女性,一个工程师,一个华裔移民,一个亚裔美国人,一个女儿.....
成为一名艺术家真的很劳累。艺术家总是有一种永不满足的渴望。我意识到我已经变成了这样的一个生物,她不停地消耗着自己。我必须剖析她,重新审视,重新组合,并将她展示出来。她是我唯一的素材,也是我唯一的所有。
就在这时,我找出了我制作的那些纸张,那些从我书中多余出来的副本。不知为何,当我翻阅这些页面时,那些不可读的字节和比特突然变得不再令我困惑。这些神秘的信件给了我一个开始:一堆没有意义的、直觉的、没有理解的模糊翻译。然后,我开始缝纫。
——刘昕,2023年五月
The Ground is Falling
Aranya Art Center, Sept 25 2021 - Jan 6 2022
curated by Iris Long
text by Iris Long
Nothing is closer to our vision of the connection between human and non-human worlds than the cosmos today. That vision encompasses the perspectives of Russian cosmism, in which the universe resurrects and even immortalizes the past. It encompasses discussions of planetary engineering (Hansen, Bratton). And it encompasses the many feminist ecologists reconsidering the bonds and legacies of being “more than human” in the cosmic past, present, and future, building a profoundly ethical sensibility rooted in reverence. This universe, loaded with visions of eternal life, faith in engineering, and a new ethics of species, is tending toward the ultimate or extreme in multiple ways.
In a sense, we seem to have completed not only the continuous metaphysical engineering project that is “the world as a sphere” (Yuk), but also the physical civilizational expansion that has followed the curve of that sphere. Over the last half-century, we have already witnessed the overview effect, symbolized by the blue dot, and seen the full reflection that Buckminster Fuller projected onto the Earth’s spherical structure. Perhaps now we ought to consider what lies beyond the overview and the blue dot—a planetary existence that can no longer be fully described as “spherical” and can no longer be limited by a vision of what’s out there. To some extent, the “outside” could disappear at any moment.
While Blue Origin and SpaceX have driven interest in human spaceflight, and even sparked bold statements about a new Space Age, precision cosmology has explored dark matter sitting silently in the void. In the deep space narrative, the flames of rocket boosters and high-energy cosmic rays entangle the obvious and the hidden, the surface and the interior. The exhibition attempts to explore a non-vertical, topological perspective towards the universe. In her long-term projects, Xin Liu has situated herself on the boundary line between celestial objects, experiences of deep space, the cosmic ecosystem, and many other topics, as well as within continuous translations of vocabularies from multiple disciplines. Within this exhibition, Liu retains her usual working methods developed around mapping, modeling, and precision instruments, and also constructs three narrative threads that run through the exhibition space: a potato seed that was transported to the International Space Station via manned space flight, an anonymous “white stone” from the sky, and a series of satellite signals radiating between the Earth’s orbit and surface. They all seem to be in motion: the instruments are rotating, the potato is sprouting, and the fallen object is rumbling. The pieces of technology, plants, debris, soil, shadows, and humans that appear in the exhibition seem to be governed by an unspoken, overarching rule, regardless of whether this can be called “the cosmos.” This invisible, overarching energy has more primitive associations and unfolds in a spiral circumscribing the exhibition’s verticality.
Flying above the ground could mean taking an expedition, or it could imply going into exile, while falling into the Earth’s core could be a return to orbit. The one-way vertical universe is confronting an epistemological reorganization. Beyond the upper bounds of engineering and the limits of mechanics, the political, technological, and cultural power projected into space constructs another kind of deep time that extends into deep space. It forces us to reconsider everything that we have inscribed or woven: people, fragments, signals, space minerals, and various suppositions and deductions in space. The dimension and speed of deep space narratives are being gradually dissolved into more diverse, poetic, entangled, and internalized forms, which may allow cosmic engineering and cosmic metabolism to achieve henosis (oneness). What the exhibition projects is simply one version of many potential narratives; it is condensed into a specific deep space that one human body is narrating. Here, the whole world falls straight down.
寰宇直下
龙星如
没有什么比“宇宙”在今天更接近人与非人世界联系的想象。不论是俄国宇宙主义视角下,宇宙将过去之物复生至永生的设定,还是媒介技术工程学所展开的关于星球工程的论述(Hansen, Bratton),抑或诸多女性生态主义研究者在宇宙背景下重新思考过去、当下和未来之间“不止人类”(more than human)的纽带与遗产,并饱含敬畏所建构的深切伦理,这颗装载了永生想象,工程信念和新物种伦理的宇宙,正在多重向度上开始趋于极致和极端。
我们似乎已经某种意义上完成了“世界作为一个球体”的连续不断的形而上学工程(Yuk),和物理上沿着圆球弧面的文明扩张。过去半个世纪,我们也经历了虚空中的蓝点所象征的总观效应(overview effect),和巴克敏斯特·富勒(Buckminster Fuller)在地球圆形结构上所投射的整一观照,而此刻我们所处之地,或许更关于“总观之后”和“蓝点之外”所发生的一切(what's beyond the overview and the blue dot)——一个不再可用“球形”充分解释的行星存在,它不再受限于对“外面究竟有是什么”的想象,甚至“外部”可能随时消失。
在蓝色起源和SpaceX助推人类对载人航天的关注,乃至引发“新太空时代”壮语的同时,精确宇宙学的发展也进一步探向了虚空中缄默的暗物质,助推器的火焰和高能宇宙射线在深空中形成显化与内隐,表与里的多重胶葛。宇宙在垂直向度之外的,与科学和意识相关的拓扑,也正是展览试图探索的起点。刘昕在长期的工作中将自身置于天体物,深空经验和宇宙生态等种种话题的边界线,以及多学科语言的不断转译中。艺术家在保留了一贯以来围绕测绘、建模和精准仪器展开的工作方法的同时,试图在展览的现场建构三条穿插的线索:一颗由载人航天设备运往空间站,并前往异星的土豆种子,一颗从天而降的虚构“白石”,以及一串串迭宕在地球轨道和地表之间的卫星信号。它们似乎都在某种运动态势中:设备旋转,土豆发芽,天空中落体轰隆作响。展览中出现的技术物,植物,残骸,土壤,影子,人类,似乎都被一种更不可言说的宏观规则所主宰——不论是否以“宇宙”之名。这一不可见的宏观能量也勾连起更原始性的联想, 在展览的垂直向度上螺旋展开。
离地飞行可能是征途也可能是流亡,跌入地心可能是回到地轨。单向度的垂直宇宙开始面临认识论上的重组,工程上限和力学极限之外,投注在太空中的政治、技术和文化力量,也构筑了往深空延伸的另一种深层时间(deep time),它迫使我们重新思考我们所印刻或编织的一切:太空中的人,残片,信号,矿产和种种猜测与推演。深空叙事的向度和速度,正在被缓缓化解为更多样,婉转,纠缠和内化的形态,工程学的宇宙和有代谢的宇宙或许可能归一(henosis)。展览所投影的,只是诸多潜在叙事的其中一个版本,它坍缩成一个由一人之躯讲述的具体深空,此处,寰宇直下。
Is breeding a physiological instinct for women? I put my life (time, effort, intelligence) into an inorganic, ruthless mechanical system, and then place my bone and blood (teeth) in the center. It is part of me, my avatar. We will never be alive in the same space, it will break into pieces before returning to Earth. It came to life in the absence of gravity, but I am standing here firmly. I speculate that "humanity" will not break through the interstellar space-time distance in the form of organism. If we acknowledge our limits as biological species, how can human beings face the others, who are created and feared by us?
— Xin Liu
孕育,是女性的生理本能吗?我将自己的生命(时间,精力,智慧)放入一个无机的,残酷的机械系统中,然后将骨骼和血液(牙齿)放在中心。她成为我的一部分,我的化身。我们永远不会在同一个时间中共存,它将在返回地球前分裂成碎片。她只在失重的领域里舞蹈,但我坚定地站在地表。我猜想“人”永远无法以生命体的形式突破星际时空距离。当我们承认自己在肉身上的极限之后,将如何面对被我们创造和支配的他者?
— 刘昕
The exhibition is part of my Van Lier Fellowship in Museum of Arts and Design
From the curator:
Initially trained as a mechanical engineer, Liu thinks of science as her first language and uses this vernacular to tease out artistic nuance alongside scientific precision. Utilizing media that might be perceived as lacking in poetry, Liu presents deeply personal reflections.
Through the lens of space exploration, genetics, and geology, Xin Liu: Fellow Focus gazes both inward and into the Earth’s orbit, offering a self-portrait as expansive as it is intimate
I curated A glitch in the stars in Ars Electronica 2018 to showcase six projects from Space Exploration Initiative, MIT Media Lab.
In 1990, from 6 million kilometers away, Voyager 1 took a snapshot of our existence in the universe: a pale blue dot. In it, we saw the loneliness and impermanence of our species, a realization that continues to sustain a thriving, resonating call for the future. However, Space is not for humans. We are never meant to be there, an error in the wild. The isolation, lack of gravity, radiation and all the risks there can kill us in minutes.
What is human experience beyond the earthbound? Here, six projects form the Space Exploration Initiative of MIT Media Lab are asking the same question and bringing possibilities to the toughest, impossible space:
A musical instrument that only plays in zero-gravity, pneumatic surface that morphs to embrace the human body in zero-g, self-assembly infrastructure for the next generation of zero gravity habitats, spider-like performance with the three-dimensional movements of a weightless body, scents that capture the memories of our homeland and a grappler for landing foundational infrastructure on an asteroid.
All the projects were successfully deployed and performed in a zero-gravity parabolic flight last year. They are hopes beyond solutions, imaginations more than facts. Just like generations of observers, they see our future in the stars.
My Tear Series and Orbit Weaver are participating the exhibition Surpassing r=a(1-sinθ) in Qimu Space, curated by Iris Long
Curatorial text:
I. 短暂平衡
不仅是“诗人”,还是“少女诗人” 的小冰出版了诗集(并开放版权);程序已经能写出重金属专辑(《Coditany of Timeness》)和模仿Lichtenstein 的作品风格;外形怪怖的Debater在与人类的辩论中获得了更多票数;各种智能助手(Siri, Cortana, Alexa),和Google Brain团队给神经网络加密算法的命名方式(Alice/Bob/Eve)都具有人性色彩。我们似乎在人与机器之间漫长的相处模式演化中,找到了一种短暂的、带有诗意的动态平衡,通过对技术的艺术性解释与场景建设,弥合着硬核技术与大众阅读语境的裂隙。
II. 元领地
技术与艺术对这一暧昧地带的双向逼近也似乎允许了一种元领地的存在,以涵纳非功能导向的、游戏性和故事性的创造。设想一个展览,从这种动态平衡出发,并采取一种相对柔和的向度:它试图处理科技与艺术的议题,但并不架设任何优先级;没有裸露在外的电路板,也不呈现“科技”原材料;不立足科学的圈地自萌,也不鼓励对艺术的盲目崇拜。
III. 阿派朗
阿那克西曼德在米利都派的年代就设想过世界不同种类的物质都来自被称之为“阿派朗”(apeiron,意为“无限定”)的最简成分。这种最简成分在今天成为数据,化身为大多数人知识外的一片飞地,钝化在冰冷的运算结构之间。当科技能以更精准的方式对时空、环境乃至人的精神世界进行测量与统计时,原本用于信息与机械过程的测试、量化与排序逻辑漫出到更多交叉领域,在产生过度简化倾向的同时,也默许了数据威权和新阶级的诞生,人的尺度正在重新被审视甚至无处安放。
IV. 那一个词
发生在上述“元领地”中的诗性转换,以及人类与技术对象的反复磨合,不仅仅是开篇所述之“硬核技术与大众阅读语境的裂隙”的工具,也是一块置空的场所,一种tabula rasa,为计算机时代的超速现实提供一种达达式的向度——它无关于创造任何“奇观”。正如福楼拜所言:“不论一个作家所要描写的东西是什么,只有一个名词可供他使用,只有一个动词能使对象生动,只有一个形容词能使对象的性质鲜明。因此就得用心去寻找,直至找到那一个名词、那一个动词和那一个形容词。”
V. 展览
计划做一个展览,视为寻求这一个词语的尝试。