The Artsy Vanguard 2025: Xin Liu

The Mothership is currently on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles as part of PST Art, a series of exhibitions across Southern California. Another show in that program, at the Benton Museum of Art in Pomona, also features Liu’s video The White Stone (2021). Over the last few years, the artist—who is originally from Xinjiang, China, and studied in the United States, at RISD and then MIT’s experimental Media Lab—has exhibited in some of the foremost museums and biennials across the globe. But with her science-meets-art approach, she straddles two worlds, also working with institutions like the SETI Institute, where she is an artist in residence, and Cornell Tech, where is a visiting fellow through 2025. Her work is ambitious and cross-disciplinary, involving experiments with technologies from space travel to DNA sequencing.

It was working on The White Stone—a major commission for her biggest solo show to date at Aranya Art Center in China—that marked a turning point in Liu’s practice, she explained. For three months during COVID-19 lockdowns, she and her crew traveled across rural China. The film documents their hunt for debris from space rockets that fall in the barren landscape there, where they become haunting monuments of outer-space travel. “Honestly, until the very last week of the entire filming process, I wasn’t sure whether we could find anything,” she said, adding that she considered using CGI if nothing turned up. “In the last week, we found two [pieces of] debris. It was quite a magic experience…it really felt like another world.”

This otherworldly energy comes across in the film, which is made up of landscape drone footage—sometimes shown upside down, inverting sky and earth. These shots are intercut with closeups on the debris and ethereal dance sequences in the desert. Alongside a moody, ominous soundtrack, a voiceover teases out the connections between this landscape and other planets. “Lots of the projects I do are world-building and storytelling, rather than object-making,” Liu said. Nonetheless, the project led to a sculpture series, too: “Debris” (2021), in which the artist cast parts of the rocket refuse in steel. These sculptures were initially classified by the Chinese government as military technology. After three years of negotiations, they were finally able to leave the country, and are on view at the Benton Museum alongside The White Stone.

Outer space pervades Liu’s work. Even the inspirations she name-checks—the movie Alien, for instance, and the anime TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion—often reference interplanetary turmoil. Fittingly, after studying at MIT, Liu became the founding arts curator of the Space Exploration Initiative at its Media Lab. There, she undertook an astounding feat: In 2019, she sent one of her wisdom teeth to space.

Living Distance, the resulting film, performance, and sculptural project, originally began as a proposal for a robot vehicle with a unique movement mechanism involving “shooting threads and [dragging] itself like a Spider Woman.” Liu applied through MIT to test her robot’s movement on a suborbital spaceflight. But, she realized, her vehicle needed a passenger. Her recently removed wisdom teeth were the perfect choice of space voyager, she decided. As she stood on the brink of a new phase of adulthood and self-acceptance, her tooth’s journey out of Earth’s atmosphere became about her own transition in life. “I realized I was creating an avatar of my own,” she said.

While Liu is fascinated by the cosmos, for her, it is more interesting as a metaphor than as a destination. “I do not think humans are meant to venture beyond the Earth. Our body is so adapted to this world,” she said. Her more philosophical and personal approach to technology—including space travel as well as DNA surveillance and cryogenic freezing—stands in contrast to the accelerationist tendencies of the Silicon Valley set that share these interests. Despite this, early in her career, Liu’s work was sometimes dismissed for being too “tech bro.”

“If we are even gendering subject matter,” Liu said, “then we’re giving away powers in spaces that are actually very dominating nowadays, such as space exploration, or petroleum.” Her work is partially about reclaiming a conversation that is often led by a few individualist (and typically male) voices.

Asserting herself was also an important part of Liu’s 2023 solo show at Make Room in Los Angeles, which represents her. Here, Liu exhibited a series of backlit panels entitled “Fortune Tellers,” which use the vast amount of data she received when sequencing her own DNA. Mounted to the wall at an angle, ready to be read by the viewer, these small sheets of rice paper are printed with Liu’s DNA sequence and then carefully embroidered by the artist in multicolored thread. The series is an attempt to affirm agency over her own body, amid the ambiguities of personal identity that the sequencing process evoked at this time: her Chinese background in the context of heightened anti-Asian racism during the pandemic, for example, or her anticipatory feelings, as a married woman in her thirties, around childbirth and inheritance.

Make Room founder Emilia Yin said she was immediately intrigued by Liu’s work when she first encountered it, six years ago. “Her practice immediately stood out due to the way she seamlessly bridges her background in science and engineering with a deeply poetic approach to exploring the world,” Yin said. “Each project we worked on together became an opportunity to craft a presentation that felt like a window into her broader vision…offering viewers a momentary glimpse into the larger, ongoing journeys she undertakes in her work.”

For Liu, the scientific experiments in her artworks aren’t a way to distance herself from Earth and humanity, but rather to come closer to others. “Being an artist is a way of being—you’re curious, you’re sensitive, you’re alive,” Liu said. “Artmaking is the portal that allows people to come inside…it’s the desire to communicate that experience.”

The Artsy Vanguard 2025