Giving a lecture at Rice University

I will be in Houston, Texas on March 5th to give a talk about my work and to speak about my practice as a form of research.

Ani Liu
Tuesday, March 5 // 7:00 PM
Sewall Hall, room 301

What is art as research? How does making become a method of inquiry for exploring questions in science, technology, culture, and reality? Ani Liu is giving an artist talk about her practice, with works in media ranging from microbiology, artificial intelligence and robotics. Through the work, she explores themes in motherhood, identity, labor and the body in a technologically mediated world.

You can learn more here: https://art.rice.edu/spring-2024-visiting-artist-lecture-series

Showing new works at the James Gallery

I am showing six new drawings in an exhibition titled Textures of Feminist Preserverance at the James Gallery at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Pictured below is a lactocyte, a cell that makes milk. For the last few years, I have been obsessed with scientific and medical imagery surrounding female bodies, approaching the material with simultaneous curiosity and criticality.

The show is titled Textures of Feminist Perseverance and it is a joint exhibition between the James Gallery and the Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space.

From the curatorial statement:

Presented in two venues, Textures of Feminist Perseverance asks how women's daily experiences and contributions are recorded in physical, virtual, and social public spheres. Centering the work of 17 female-identifying artists, this project supports artists who are imagining ways for women to take up the space they are already producing. What might a city honoring women's lived experiences look like? How can the city be a living archive of women's accomplishments in a visual vocabulary that may not already be recognized in the dominant discourse? This work is often achieved through a preoccupation with hands-on and labor-intensive making practices that foreground physical and embodied attentiveness to materials, social gathering, and awareness of time.

Artists on view: Sarah Ahmed, Mimi Biyao Bai, Sonya Blesofsky, Langdon Graves, Sara Jimenez, Martine Kaczynski, Rhea Karam, Amy Khoshbin, Fay Ku, Ani Liu, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Jen Mazza, Deborah Mesa-Pelly, Ashley Minner, Natalie Moore, Ellie Murphy, Dina Weiss

With sincere gratitude to the curatorial team: Dina Weiss, Katherine Carl, Jodi Waynberg

The exhibition is featured in Hyperallergic Spring 2024 New York Art Guide

Currently showing at 601 Artspace

I am currently showing an installation at 601 Artspace in a show titled In Absentia, curated by Eliana Blechman. It opens on February 10th and runs until April 14th.

Curator’s Statement

We hold stories in our bodies, leaving traces of ourselves and our histories as we move through spaces. Those remnants left behind can be loud, infiltrating a room, or they can be soft, subtle, nearly imperceptible.

In Absentia focuses on these spatial traces, exploring nontraditional modes of portraiture through the conspicuous absence of the body. The artists in this exhibition use bodily impressions, remnants, and residues to explore personal and social themes of loss and mourning, historical memory, unseen labor, and desire. In removing the physical body, the artists emphasize experiences and contexts that are traditionally overlooked, inviting the viewer to consider the remaining empty spaces or materials more closely. Despite removing corporeality from their work, the artists’ bodies become even more present.

It is not by design, but noteworthy, that all of the artists in this exhibition are women. Ongoing debates over women’s bodily autonomy surface in many of the works, as does the goal of preserving and protecting histories and culture. These artists are storytellers, memory keepers, and caretakers of personal and public knowledge.

Ani Liu’s Untitled (pumping at work) circulates a facsimile of the volume of breastmilk produced by the artist during one week through a series of clear, coiled tubes that snake on and around the gallery floor and front desk. Patented in 1854, the breast pump can be considered a liberatory device, empowering women to reenter the workforce postpartum. It can also, however, be seen to create an obligation for new mothers to return to a capitalist industry that devalues the already considerable labor involved in caretaking. In displaying the milk produced by the artist disembodied from its source, Liu renders visible the often invisible labors of reproduction and motherhood. In Untitled (pumping at work) the labor of caretaking infringes on the labor of the office, overtaking the gallery desk and demanding recognition.

I am showing alongside these wonderful artists: Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Priscilla Dobler-Dzul, Gyun Hur, Joiri Minaya, Barb Smith

You can see some images from the show below.

Exhibiting in Offworlds at YveYANG Gallery

I am happy to share that I will be exhibiting in a show titled Offworlds at YveYANG Gallery in New York City. The opening is this Saturday, October 21st from 6-8PM.

Image courtesy of YveYANG Gallery

The Surrogacy (Bodies are not Factories) by Ani Liu. Image credit Brad Farwell.

Offworlds

Group show

10.21.2023–12.02.2023

“What do you do when your world starts to fall apart?”
– The Mushroom at the End of the World, “Prologue: Autumn Aroma” (2015)
by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

“We once believed ourselves destined to a vast sidereal ocean, now we find ourselves thrown back at the harbor whence we started…”
– The Ends of the World, “Chapter 1: What rough beast” (2016)
by Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Offworlds brings together recent and new works by 18 artists – Shuyi Cao, Doreen Chan, Furen Dai, Dominique Fung, Antonia Kuo, Jia-Jen Lin, Ani Liu, Xin Liu, Xinyi Liu, Tan Mu, Goldie Poblador, Lau Wai, Augustina Wang, Anne Wu, Huidi Xiang, Rachel Youn, Lu Zhang and Stella Zhong – that contemplate the possibilities found in detritus, ruin, and an aesthetics of failure, which emerge in the monolithic face of “the end of the world.” In terms of materiality – from dirt, ash, petrified wood, cement, everyday rubble, to dismantled yet functioning machine parts – this exhibition further embraces the quality of being “off,” of being marginal, as well as marked by cyclical decline.

And what is “the end of the world” but a “downward turn of the Western anthropological adventure”? According to decolonial scholars Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, to refuse this one central conception of “the world” as defined by promises of infinite progress and growth, is to allow for the greater coexistence of multiple “planes of immanence traced by the numberless collectives that traverse and animate it.” Here, at “the end,” modernity and colonialism leave trails of decay indeed. Yet as anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes, “we can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes” where possibilities for other visions of the future and worldbuilding may lie in the remnants.

Amongst the works in this exhibition, Shuyi Cao’s new reconfiguration of the installation Lost in a Fathomless Sea presents a fictional archaeological site that considers earthly materials (from ashes of spruce, tar, petroleum to concrete) of human extraction embedded within more-than-human histories and temporalities. Doreen Chan’s gallery window front arrangement infuses rotating arrangements of produce and flowers with dream recordings sourced from her long-term, participatory project HalfDream that explores the power of subconscious worlding become collective. For Furen Dai, the (mal)function of encyclopedic museums and their (art-less) display methodologies became the last desolate subjects of a new pseudo-documentary On the Future Ruins. Jia-Jen Lin’s generative sound and visual work Collapsing Landscape: Patch B_3 renders the rapidly changing conditions of glaciers in what the artist calls a kind of “post landscape” art. Ani Liu investigates the ethics of “bringing life into the world" and the biopolitical relations between reproduction and technology via artificial, interspecies wombs in The Surrogacy. Xin Liu’s video The White Stone tells a mythology and future history of rocket debris set across remote villages and deserts in the southwest of China; what happens to these bodies destined for the heavens when they fall back to earth? In her documentation of socio-technological histories, Tan Mu’s new painting entitled Silicon contemplates a purified silicon stone and the fractured impact of its extraction on global supply chains within the current Silicon Age. Goldie Poblador creates a series of UV-lit glass specimens of marine species impacted by a recent industrial oil spill in the Oriental Mindoro region in the Philippines. Beastwoman, a new oil painting by Augustina Wang reimagines “the end of the world” as the end of Western anthropocentrism and humanism, and reclaims a generative in-between image space for the bestial, carnal, and apocalyptic. Rachel Youn’s Pendulum repurposes the mechanical arms of an unwanted baby swing into an assemblage that sweeps up piles of dirt with faux plant leaves, as its automated rocking function works to the brink of collapse. Of her ceramic works including a manifesto for the collective Wildman Clab, Lu Zhang questions what is "normal" or "civilized" as defined by a Western-centric worldview. New site-specific works by Stella Zhong encapsulate worlds within worlds, while referencing the disorienting relativity of earthly to cosmic scales.

In science fiction, an “offworld” denotes an exoplanet that operates (often for harboring new colonies or the continuous extraction of resources) beyond a main planet (often one that has ecologically collapsed into lifeless ruin). It is an image increasingly familiar in popular media. If from our earthly ruins, the offworld represents the last upward and outward hope for a great cosmic escape, this exhibition also looks downward and inward to the many worlds we already inhabit, which are vitally marginal. For many of us, we have epistemologically inhabited a failing, central world, yet also have traversed between many others, some of which have already come to an end. It is from here that the works in Offworlds depart in multiple, fractured, ruinous directions.

About the curator:
Danni Shen is a curator and writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is currently the Curatorial & Public Programs Assistant at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. Previous curatorial roles include at The Kitchen, Empty Gallery, and Wave Hill in New York. She was also Critic-in-Residence at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Curator-in-Residence at Residency Unlimited, and has been a visiting critic at NYU-ITP and Cornell AAP. More recent exhibitions include "Eating Otherness" at EFA Project Space NYC (2023), "Mediums and Messengers" at Bannister Gallery (2023), "Beast, Chimera, Kin" at the Hessel Museum of Art (2022) and "Collaborative Survival" at 601Artspace (2021). Shen is a contributor to various artist catalogues as well as publications including BOMB Magazine, Art in America, Heichi Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic. She holds an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) Bard College.

Footnotes:
– Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “What rough beast” in The Ends of the World (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity, 2016), 6.
– Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Humans and Terrans” in The Ends of the World (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity, 2016), 87.
– Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Anti-Ending” in Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015), 282.

http://www.yveyang.com/exhibitions/off-worlds

Showing at the Macau Biennale

Happy to share that I am exhibiting in the Macau International Art Biennale 2023, titled “Revelation To _____”.

Image courtesy of Macau Biennale

Image courtesy of Macau Biennale

Image courtesy of Macau Biennale

Image courtesy of Macau Biennale

Revelation To_" features seven local and international artists or artist duos, and promises to be thought-provoking and engaging in equal measures. Their artworks examine the age of artificial intelligence while also offering a visual ode to human existence.

Exhibition Period:
2023.10.6 – 11.30

Exhibition Venue:
Lisboa Gallery, Macau Fisherman's Wharf

Curators:
林小雯 Lam Sio Man
陸竹 Pal Lok Chok

Participating Artists:
樊燕君 Fan In Kuan
梁子毛 Leong Chi Mou
梁臻 Leong Chon
劉安妮 Ani Liu
媽打沙律 Marta Stanisława Sala 及 張健文 Cheong Kin Man
克萊門特·瓦拉 Clement Valla
張璐 Lu Zhang

Showing work at Design for the Unthinkable World in Italy

Happy to share I am exhibiting work in a show titled “Design for the Unthinkable World” at KORA in Italy.

Image courtesy of Design for the Unthinkable World

From the press release:

The challenge posed to the invited artists, as archaeologists of the contemporary, was to recognize current reality, as the Real World actually looms elusive and may never have existed or may have only been imagined to simplify our existence.

Their work outlines the dynamics of the "Unthinkable World" in which we find ourselves operating, urging the visitor not only to an immersive experience but orienting them to a critical consciousness through devices of disorientation and destabilization.

Ani Liu with her The Surrogacy continues the discourse started years ago by Elio Caccavale regarding the intimate biological compatibility between humans and pigs. In a similar vein, Parsons & Charlesworth describe a hypothetical group of humans using advanced technologies to cohabit with other animal species. Mischer'traxler give the Danube River with its flora and fauna the rights it needs to legally defend itself from human abuse. Guy Keulemans and Kyoko Hashimoto direct the gaze toward fossil and mineral resources by making people appreciate their scarcity. Jose de la O focuses on the culture of his native Mexico by ironically reflecting on how certain household appliances could have been developed according to local popular culture. Finally, SulSolSal shows with a video essay The World Without Us a dystopian future in which the global South ceases to exist.

KORA - CENTRO DEL CONTEMPORANEO

Via Vittorio Emanuele 19, 73020, Castrignano de' Greci, LE, Italy

Curators: Craig Bremner, Giovanni Innella, Paul Rodgers

Designers and Artists: Ani Liu, delaO design studio, Guy Keulemans & Kyoko Hashimoto, mischer’traxler, Parsons & Charlesworth, SulSolSal

Showing at Chengdu Biennale

Happy to share that I am showing at the Chengdu Biennale in Chengdu, China. You can read about the show here and here.

Image credit: Chengdu Biennale

Image credit: Chengdu Biennale

Image credit: Chengdu Biennale

Image credit: Chengdu Biennale

From the Beijing Times:

On July 17, the artistic tapestry of southwest China’s Sichuan Province came alive with the opening of the “Time Gravity – 2023 Chengdu Biennale” at the Chengdu Art Museum. This esteemed exhibition has cemented its status as an eminent platform for fostering international artistic dialogue and promoting the rich tapestry of global artistry.

This year, the Chengdu Biennale has cast its net wide, drawing in an impressive collection of 476 artworks crafted by 235 artists hailing from 22 countries and regions. The participating artists represent a diverse spectrum of creative talent, with revered Chinese artists like Xu Bing, Sui Jianguo, Zhou Chunya, He Duoling, Zhang Xiaogang, and Ding Yi standing shoulder to shoulder with internationally celebrated names such as David Hockney, Timm Ulrichs, and Nam June Paik.

The exhibition is thematically divided into nine sections, each providing an immersive exploration of distinct artistic disciplines. From the melding of technology and art, the amalgamation of data and creative expression, to the convergence of biotechnology and intelligent technology, the event offers a tantalizing artistic buffet that traverses multiple artistic domains.

Showing at the Today Art Museum in Beijing

I am happy to share that I am showing The Surrogacy (bodies are not factories) at the Today Art Museum in Beijing, China.

Image credit: Today Art Museum

Image credit: Today Art Museum

Image Credit: Today Art Museum

Image credit: Today Art Museum

From the press release: link

To Your Eternity, the fourth installment of the Today Art Museum’s art and technology themed biennial, zooms ever slightly away from an obsession with the now and the next, but revels in unlikely, luminous juxtapositions across geography and time: Isamu Noguchi’s 1947 monument for a world after humans with Siah Armajani’s 1969 attempt to build mathematically viable towers towards the limits of the earth’s gravitational pull; retro-style video games exploring China’s first wave of entrepreneurship with extreme speculations of a post-Socialist “thousand-year plan”; a space artist in search of fallen rockets with a photographer chasing tornadoes in the eye of the storm; virtual simulations that transport visitors to the wetlands of the Rhone delta as well as the caves of Alaskan glaciers; the aesthetic possibilities of merging bodies and machines with cross-species reproductive technology; the beguiling world of jinns that transcend space with new sci-fi stories about languages that warp time; “Asian Futures without Asians” in Hollywood’s entertainment industrial complex; stately portraits of Huawei’ figurehead with a migrant worker’s durational, maximalist record-making of precarious labor. 

The exhibition takes its title and spirit from the 2021 anime To Your Eternity. Created by Yoshitoki Ōima, the story follows an amorphous alien entity as it approximates various forms of inorganic, plant, animal, and ultimately human lives through inhabiting their life cycles. This trans-species metamorphosis is spurred by the death of the previous host, expanding the definition of “intelligence” to also encompass feelings, embodied experiences, and situated knowledge against a grander scale of time. The exhibition similarly hopes to immerse visitors in an exhilarating range of artistic and philosophical perspectives on what technology means for our imagination, heart, and livelihood beyond media novelty or gadgetry. To Your Eternity features an unusual range of media: VR experiences, AI and algorithm-based art, games, video, lecture performance, sculpture, drawing, wallpaper, photography, tapestry, lacquer, mural, and monument. By inserting crucial art historical examples from the mid-20th century into the mix of more recent work, the exhibition invites ponderings on longer throughlines in historical conditionings of our current technological and existential crisis that never truly went away. 

To Your Eternity presents special commissions from artists Tishan Hsu, Morehshin Allahyari, and Astria Suparak. In the opening weeks, public programs include lectures and workshops with artists Li Jiabao, Liu Xin, and zzyw, as well as a book launch with NYU Shanghai for Machine Decision Is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2023).

Artists: aaajiao, Morehshin Allahyari, Siah Armajani, Ching Ho Cheng, Tishan Hsu, Natalie Ivis, Jiang Yifan, An-My Lê, Li Jiabao, Ani Liu, Jen Liu, Xin Liu, Lu Yang, Toshio Matsumoto, Miao Ying, James J. A. Mercer, Isamu Noguchi, Pan Caoyuan, Francesco Paterlini, Peng Ke, Agnieszka Polska, Walid Raad, Mark Ramos, Sarah Rosalena, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Astria Suparak, Pelin Tan + Anton Vidokle, Wang Ye, Wu Ziyang, Chris Zhongtian Yuan, Zhan Youbing, zzyw (Yang Wang + Zhenzhen Qi) with Jiaoyang Li, Qianlin Li, and Zongying Liu.

Curator: Xin Wang
Director: Jessica Zhang
Curatorial team: Yan Yan, Xin Zhan, Jinger Xu, Kewei Xiong, Tianrun Zhao
Visual design: Pianpian He, Max Harvey
Exhibition design: Yiran Mu, Nianlai Zhong (advisor)

Curator bio
Xin Wang is an art historian and curator based in New York. Currently writing a PhD dissertation on Soviet Hauntology at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, she is also a Visiting Critic at Yale University’s MFA program in Photography. Her forthcoming publications include a chapter titled “Machine Envy” in Machine Decision Is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2023) and an essay for choreographer Benjamin Akio Kimitch’s monograph Tiger Hands. 

Today Art Museum 
Established in 2002, Today Art Museum is one of the first private nonprofit art museums in mainland China. A pioneer that has transformed the contemporary art landscape in China as well as urban culture in Beijing, TAM aims at exploring three pillars—contemporary art, technology, and design in the global context. TAM is committed to providing an open platform for artists, the public, and interdisciplinary inquiries. 

Showing at Gates Foundation

I am happy to share that I am showing Pregnancy Menswear at the Gates Foundation in the show Designing Motherhood. The show is open until December 30, 2023, and you can learn more here: https://www.discovergates.org/exhibition/designingmotherhood/


From the Gates Foundation:

This exhibition explores the arc of human reproduction through the lens of art and design. The exhibition examines the evolution of rights and societal norms connected to contraception, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experiences over the last 150 years, highlighting that birth—and the culture that surrounds it—impacts every living person. While being born is a universal human experience, the designs that shape it are not. Designing Motherhood invites you to consider why and how we have developed designs to facilitate reproductive health.

Featuring over 200 objects, this exhibition brings together a unique collection of contemporary artists and designers whose work helps us ponder the political, economic, and social implications of how we all relate to reproduction, juxtaposing photography with product design, maternal and newborn health innovations, maternity fashion, and much more.

Essay on Everlasting Plastics

I wrote an essay reflecting on the theme “Everlasting Plastics” for the Venice Biennale in Architecture this year, 2023. Many thanks to the editors and entire team: Tizziana Baldenebro and Lauren Leving. Edited by Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt and Joanna Joseph. You can read my contribution at this link.

Awarded Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica

I am happy to share that my work won an honorary mention in the Artificial Intelligence and Life Arts category of Prix Art Electronica. This honorary mention is selected as one of the top 2% of this year’s submissions. You can see images and read the judge’s statement below. Many thanks to the entire jury, and congratulations to all the winners!

https://ars.electronica.art/prix/en/winners/#artificialintelligenceandlifeart

Speaking at MoMA R&D Salon

I am pleased to share that I spoke at the Museum of Modern Art recently, at the R&D Salon on the topic of good. From their website: MoMA Research & Development provides information and critical tools to identify and explore new directions and opportunities for The Museum of Modern Art and—leading by example—the broader museum field. It is both crucible and catalyst for new ways of thinking and doing in museums. You can find my talk up on the website in a few days here: http://momarnd.moma.org/salons/. With much gratitude to Paola Antonelli and Christina Moushoul.


Speaking at Northeastern University as part of Design Week in Boston

Happy to share that I will be in Boston on Thursday March 23 to give a talk and be in conversation with Michelle Millar Fisher, the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts, MFA Boston.

Our talk is titled: Design and AI at Play: Ani Liu and Michelle Millar Fisher on Design as Research.

Admission is free, and the event is from 5:00PM - 7:00 PM in West Village F, Leon Street, Boston, MA. Details can be found at this link, and below! Hope to see you there.

Solo show highlighted in Artforum's top 10 of 2022!

I am beyond thrilled to share that my solo show Ecologies of Care was selected as a top 10 of 2022 by art curator Đỗ Tường Linh in Artforum! https://www.artforum.com/print/202210/do-tuong-linh-s-highlights-of-2022-89673

I am so grateful to Jodi Waynberg, Alessandro Facente, and all the amazing humans at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space that made this show happen. It was just a few months after giving birth when I made most of the work for this show and I could not have done it without the privilege of having immense support from my family.

I also wanted to thank you too— you who take the time to look at art and support artist such as me- it means the world.

New works unveiled at the opening of the new MIT Museum

Pleased to share that I have three works in the brand new MIT Museum that opened this weekend on October 2, 2022. The exhibition is titled Gene Cultures, and is open for two years.

From the exhibition site:

“As the pace of technological advances in the field of genetic discovery quickens, questions arise.

Who decides how and when transformative new biotechnologies will be used? What questions do we need to ask before making decisions leading to irrevocable results?

Join the conversation as you explore dramatic breakthroughs in genetic technologies and engage with artworks—witty, provocative, absurd, and profound—that prompt us to consider our future - now.”

Installation view of the work in the exhibition Gene Cultures. Image courtesy of the artist.

Installation view of Gene Cultures. Image courtesy of the artist.

Exhibition wall text. Image courtesy of the artist.

The Surrogacy. Image courtesy of the artist.

Installation view of the work in the exhibition. Image courtesy of the artist.