Xin Liu: Seedlings and Offsprings

Seedlings and Offsprings 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 themes that include space travel, vitality, mutation, and immortality. As a way of examining 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 vegetable 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.