Xin Liu| An Inward Universe
Xin Liu, Orbit Weaver, 2017, underwater concept shooting. Photo: Rob Chron.
My wisdom tooth was aching during the week before I had this conversation with the artist Xin Liu in London. When we finally sat on the bench in a park near Bermondsey, sipping a cup of iced coffee, the ache stopped. “I hope it was not me,” she laughed, with a slight sense of unsureness, as if the pain of my wisdom tooth really had something to do with her.
This seemingly weird dialogue is not total nonsense. In 2019, Xin launched the project Living Distance, in which she sent one of her wisdom teeth into the outer space and back down to Earth again. The wisdom tooth was placed in a custom crystalline machine made from robotics materials and carried by a suborbital spacecraft launched by NASA from its site in Texas. “It is like a journey of myself,” she says, “like my own transformation, but in the meantime the tooth itself becomes a newborn entity in the space.” Indeed, this “tiny, lifeless rock out of flesh” is chosen to exceed the body it comes from and “to be the first of us to go to space”. As she asks in the video of this project: what is it like to be so light—floating, spinning, detached from what we know? The tooth seeks to experience and answer the question on our behalf, weaving its journey into our imagination and perception of both space and land.
Born in Xinjiang and with a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural background of education and life, Xin now works as the Arts Curator in the Space Exploration Initiative in MIT Media Lab as an artist and engineer. Perhaps for this reason, her work contains and shows a kind of complexity, seeking tensions and reconciliations between humanity and technology, the individual and the universal, the ineffable and the measurable. From her early works such as Tear Set (2015), an installation that produces artificial tears replicating the composition of human emotional tears, to more recent projects such as Living Distance (2019) and Orbit Weaver (2018), a performance in zero gravity and underwater environment, Xin takes on her journey to explore the self as well as the universe by pinning large issues of identity, homeland and astrology onto very specific points, as if echoing the way that every single existence on Earth is anchored by gravity. She constantly interrogates: what am I as an individual, and what are we as human beings? Just as the saying on her website: gravity is the momentum of feelings, “there is always this tension between emotions, feelings, and abstract ideas or concepts…what I have been thinking about is how they are connected in my practice,” she says.
Xin Liu, Living Distance (EBIFA Device), 2019. Photo: Tim Saputo.
30 bottles of tears
What is the last time you cried? What is contained in your tears? If tears can be analyzed, can sadness or joy be measured? These are the questions that Xin Liu wishes to explore in a series of earlier practices associated with tears—both secretions of the biological body and a sign of psychological emotions. It might be hard or uncommon for us to talk about emotions and body secretions in the same breath, and we tend to state the difference between what can be scientifically explained and what cannot. But tears is a perfect example here, as all sides are already contained in this emotion-stimulated, body-secreted liquid.
This is one of the first impressions that Xin’s work conveys to me. She always starts from and deals with the opposition between a pair of concepts, while showing you that the seemingly opposite sides are in fact one integral entity. In doing so, she bridges the crack by acknowledging it. As she says, “there is always an opposite side of whatever things, but it is not to fix them or to put them back together so that they become one entity. It is better when things are scattered, because then you have the diversity, and that is where the beauty is.”
In order to understand the layers of sadness, she collects her own tears as well as that of others. She cried and brought a bottle of tears to her laboratory every day for a month in 2015; she posted online and asked strangers if they could send pictures of themselves tearing to her. Through these actions, it becomes difficult to tell whether those tears are still connected to a certain kind of emotions—say, sadness—or not, or it is just a measurable act for the sake of tear.
The later installation Tear Set (2015) seems to operate in quite a reversed way to those precedent practice. It is a crying machine that distributes artificially fabricated tear replicate of her own tears. A pump connected with electronics produces artificial tears and deliver them to a glass on the other end, where the audience could observe this clear liquid made of purified water, salt, protein (lactoferrin and lysozyme), carboxymethyl cellulose and sugar. “A hybrid of elaborated sentiments and indifferent mass-production,” as she depicts. “Many people say ‘no, you cannot do that with your tear!’ But I was like ‘why are you even afraid of it?’” she goes on, “I think this is instead the most humanistic part in my work. Because if you are truly a humanistic person, if you really believe in the truest part of the so-called human emotions, then no matter how much they are measured, you know that it is going to be fun.”
Xin Liu, Tear Set, 2015.
Are the tears collected from herself and other people ‘real’, are those produced from the machine ‘fake’? Or there is no longer any necessity to distinguish one from another? Perhaps neither one is absolutely fake, nor real, as she says, “the crying machine will create emotions for you—it is always this kind of mix, and it is just how you balance that.”
It is the same with being a human in a more general sense. Computational and information technologies are advancing so fast, to the extent that “everyone is reduced into a certain kind of data”, as Xin observes. But “isn’t it always like that? When you think of someone, you probably give that person some sorts of labels—colleagues, friends, etc., so that you store them in your own ‘database’. This is how we remember human beings too. I think it is about how much we are comfortable with it. We label, we classify, we measure, but there is always a big trust in something special about being a human, making us believe that what you will be doing is better than a pure computational system.”
Love is the same, she adds. On the one hand, there are so many discussions and theories that are convincing enough to attribute love to something predictable or calculable, and sometimes we ask ourselves: do you actually love this person or it just happened to be because of the circumstances? In the meantime, however, people want to (or choose to) believe that love is absolutely a special thing. Paradoxically, “we are always trying to figure that out, but we would never really figure out only with science and technology…It is just like there is a limit of our collective knowledge, because we are human. Although we get used to believe in growth and progress, having limits is not bad, but a beautiful thing.”
Xin Liu, Living Distance, 2019-2020. Film still by Paul Mcgeiver, second child.
Xin Liu, Living Distance, 2019-2020. Film still by Paul Mcgeiver, second child.
Xin Liu, Living Distance (EBIFA Exploded), 2019. Photo: Tim Saputo.
The macro and the micro
There was darkness all around at first, and then a wisdom tooth emerged from the darkness. This tiny, inorganic entity carries human DNA, which is about to be extracted from its mechanical shell and enters another darkness of the outer space. At the moment of extraction, you feel the detachment and a sense of weightlessness, of leaving and being untethered. This is the VR experience that comprises part of Xin Liu’s project Living Distance (2019). The weightless experience is stimulated by D-box motion chair tech. In my imagination, being weightless might bring a light sense that is more similar to floating. What your body actually does and feels, however, is “falling, but because everything around you is falling with you together, you feel as if you are still, and it looks like you are floating,” she tells me.
Either a wisdom tooth or tears, the human body or body-related material is always present in Xin’s work. This is associated with her thoughts and philosophy about scale, and in a more personal sense, her kind of political stand. “You can always see me in my work—my actual, physical body.” she says. How would an entity move about in vast emptiness? In Orbit Weaver (2017), she manages to regain control of her body and move freely in a weightless space with a hand-held device. What about the dynamics between lifting up and falling down, and the life span of technologies? She steps on the journey to ‘hunt’ for abandoned rocket debris in the desert of southwest China for the more recent video The White Stone (2021). All of these works touch on extremely big issues, but the individual experience and bodily feelings within each piece is very specific and perceptible.
Xin Liu, Orbit Weaver, 2017, in flight. Photo: Steve Boxall.
“It is all about dimensions, and how you switch among the macro- and micro-scales. You may consider the topics I am concerned with to become more outwards, but I still think my work is inwards. During the process, my internal exploration has turned from an individual or personal level to a grander state in which the individual may represent a larger community or group. But the discussion of the relations between the self and the other, human and Earth, space and land, remains unchanged…This kind of opposition between a small individual and a big topic is very important to me: the vehicle that I could operate is sill—and always—myself, my own body, but the issues that this fleeting flesh can deal with, or the space that it could enter and take motions, can be very large.”
Being aware of the limits of this ‘vehicle’ and acknowledging them, then, offers another form of relationships with the world, in which reference is also important. Our existence in the universe is just like the wisdom tooth in the outer space, and we humans seem to be so small compared to the vastness of nature or the planet. There might be one way to conquer that vastness and to become as big as its realm, when we still believed in modernity and forever growth. While nowadays in the disenchantment of the myth of progress, there is another way, which is to simply penetrate it. By going farther and exploring whatever possibilities in that space, we see our own positions and boundaries. “I think the process is a bit like the parable of the blind men and an elephant, just that the elephant here is ourselves,” Xin says, “we can only truly see ourselves when referencing to other people, or to another being, then we begin to realise and find where and who we are.”
Of course, you cannot make it work by being static or staying at a single point, and it is always about the motions and mobility of the body. When you move deep or far enough, you start to turn back and ‘see’ yourself, again. I feel quite resonated with a recent work that Xin is doing, which is also a series that she feels much connected to. Called Menophania (2022), this work contains panels made of rice paper, on which the artist sews the patterns of her DNA series with red threads. The size of the panels is quite small, about 8.5 × 11 inches each. “Most of my previous projects are big, with a clear finishing point and often involve a lot of project management. But for this one, it is more like a studio practice of actually drawing every piece. I feel very different—as a person, on a daily basis. The process is much slower and more continuous, but it is so meditating for me and I have been enjoying it a lot.”
And still, the act of sewing and making is physically and bodily engaging. Perhaps this is how Xin Liu returns from the ‘big projects’ that seem to deal with more extensive topics. On the other hand, it just proves that how far you go outward into the space or the universe is consistent with how deep you go inward into yourself. These are always two sides of the same coin.
Xin Liu, Menophania, 2022.
Never really know what the potatoes feel
Space might be the farthest destination that we can imagine during the journey of self or universe exploration. In Xin Liu’s view and practice, it is also a medium, a perspective and a way towards an epistemological extension. “When speaking of space art,” she says, “many people may think of visual artworks that takes the universe, space, stars, etc., as a depicted object, but this is more like astronomical art. For me, I would rather consider space art in relation to land art, as they share the same concerns and questions about spatial-temporal dimensions and the human situation on the planet.”
I wondered what kind of changes that this perspective might bring to her when it comes back to everyday life. “People also discuss or get involved in big topics such as climate change on a daily basis, and this requires you to have certain capacity to imagine what is happening on a global or planetary scale.” she continues, “in terms of the sensibility of scale that thinking about ‘space’ may bring, I think it is a kind of contemporary knowledge or awareness that we modern people are supposed to have.”
There are many different ways to engage with such big topics: some people are just numbed and uncaring of them, some people may feel frightened and prefer not to talk about that, a few might be very ambitious and fight to become powerful enough so that they could fix the problems. Or here is Xin’s choice, which is to acknowledge and remain her own size as a human being, and try to intervene in them as much as possible—this is more like a choice of political position beyond art creation, and the work comes naturally as a result of such ideology.
The result can be experimental, poetic, and fun, yet at the same time exploratory and deep. After sending her wisdom tooth to the outer space, she has turned her interest to other species and started to cultivate potato seeds that had travelled to space station—as she has been doing in Unearthing Futures (since 2020), a collaboration with the Peruvian artist Lucia Monge, the International Potato Centre in Lima, and the International Space Station (ISS). “Potatoes are native to Peru, and now the fifth most grown crops around the world,” she explains to me, “I feel like this is somewhat related to human colonization itself, as crop-growing is such a human thing, it is usually how we settle and gradually occupy the land.”
Xin Liu, Unearthing Futures, TPS + Berries.
“But you would never really know what the potatoes feel,” she laughs, “and you see, I have been growing them in my place, and it has been a while since I have travelled around and left them unattended. Now they are almost ‘colonizing’ my house.” By cultivating the potato seeds, Xin and Lucia are also seeking an answer to how we cultivate the future. Potatoes, or other species more than human, may provide alternative narratives of what a shared, planetary future might look like—but who knows?
With the experiments and performances of ‘art in space’, Xin has been referred to as a ‘space artist’ more frequently in recent years. “At first I was a bit reluctant of being ‘labelled’ as such,” she responds, “but what do you want people to call you otherwise? Now I don’t worry too much. I think it is also important that your concepts and ideas are communicable, and your work is understandable to the public.” At this point, we had some discussion on how an artwork should be presented, and whether the status of being ‘in the field’ should be taken as the result of the artwork or not. In her view, the starting point or the ideology behind the work can be very conceptual or philosophical, but the outcome or the means of presentation has to be concrete or modern. “What I am interested in, say, are the kinds of vision or sensibility that planetary or space thinking can bring to us, rather than just space technology.” she says, “but technology serves as a carrier for my work, so they are always mixed, and inevitably your work always falls into one track or another.”
As for the interpretation of the work, she shares a moment with me that has surprised and impressed her a lot. “I sent the video of Living Distance to a few friends and colleagues when I finished it. One of them said, ‘I sensed a trace of nostalgia and homesickness in your video’. I was so surprised, but thought she was right. Because I thought I was dealing with technology, cosmology and all those big topics at that time, and I wasn’t thinking too much about my own unconscious feelings. It was a shocking yet enjoying moment for me, a very beautiful gift, as if I had been waiting for it to happen.”
Indeed, the vitality of the work is lived and activated in that it can be interpreted in diverse ways during a long period of time, as she concludes. Perhaps it is this kind of unpredictability and openness that manifest the charm and true colours of art, and life. It is also by embracing this ongoing, processual complexity that not only artists, but also every one of us will gradually—and eventually—see, discover, and reveal the truth and beauty of ourselves and the world: the layers of an endless, inward universe.
Xin Liu, Unearthing Futures, TPS Germination.
Words by Jingsi Wang.
This story was published in noisé 02 A Falling Leaf Heralds Autumn, 2022.