Xin Liu, illustrated by Maria Chen. Inspired by a photo by Stephanie Noritz
DATE
03/2026
ARTICLE
Maria Chen
PHOTOS
Courtesy of the Artist
The London-based artist on entropy, ecology, and new works spanning the Venice Biennale, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and Public Gallery
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CREDITS
All works courtesy of the artist
There is a point, in every technological ambition, where the trajectory begins to turn. Not at launch, nor at peak velocity, but in the quiet, inevitable moment after—when systems decay, materials drift, and intention gives way to entropy. It is precisely here that Xin Liu situates her practice.
Now based in London and newly represented by Public Gallery, Liu’s work unfolds across scientific, ecological, and cosmic registers—less concerned with innovation as progress, and more with what remains in its wake. Her recent announcement with the gallery marks a moment of consolidation: a practice long operating across disciplines entering sharper institutional focus.
At the centre of Liu’s thinking is what she terms Cosmic Metabolism—a conceptual framework that treats technological systems as living, digesting entities. Rockets shed fragments that fall back to Earth; cryogenic vessels suspend organic life between preservation and decay; satellites continue to transmit long after their intended lifespan. Across these works, exhaust is not failure but a generative condition.
This logic extends through her recent projects. In The Permanent and Insatiable, Liu constructs dissolving cityscapes from PET plastics, suspended within bioreactors where enzymatic processes slowly degrade the material over time. Developed in part from her own scientific research—including a plastic-degradation payload sent to the International Space Station—the work stages a confrontation between industrial permanence and biological appetite.
What emerges is not simply a critique of material excess, but a reorientation of authorship itself: the work continues beyond the artist, beyond the institution, unfolding through processes that cannot be fully controlled.
This question of scale—temporal, ecological, planetary—becomes more pronounced in Liu’s forthcoming projects. A new iteration of The Permanent and Insatiable responds to the environmental collapse of the Aral Sea, extending her enquiry into systems of extraction and irreversible transformation. The work is expected to unfold within the wider context of the Venice Biennale, situating her practice within a global conversation on climate, technology, and survival.
At the same time, a forthcoming institutional presentation with Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo signals a deepening engagement with European institutions—marking a significant step in the public articulation of her practice. Together with her representation by Public Gallery, these developments position Liu within an increasingly visible transnational circuit spanning London, Turin, and Venice.
Closer to home, her work is currently included in Thresholds of Becoming at esea contemporary, on view through 17 May 2026. The exhibition brings together diasporic perspectives across East and Southeast Asia, framing practices that engage with transformation, identity, and material memory. Within this context, Liu’s work expands these concerns beyond the human scale—embedding them within planetary and cosmic systems that operate according to their own logics.
Yet for all its engagement with satellites, genomic code, and space-bound experiments, Liu’s work remains insistently intimate. Her installations often return to the body—not as a fixed subject, but as a site of negotiation: between reproduction and control, biology and technology, selfhood and system. In works such as A Book of Mine, where her own genome is rendered as an unreadable, expansive text, identity becomes something both materially grounded and fundamentally opaque.
This tension—between the vast and the personal, the engineered and the organic—runs throughout her practice. It is also what gives it its urgency. In an era defined by acceleration and optimisation, Liu directs attention to what lingers, degrades, and transforms over time.
If her earlier works traced the ambitions of technological ascent, her recent practice turns decisively toward what follows: the slow, entropic processes that outlast intention.
In Liu’s universe, the future is not something to be engineered into existence. It is already unfolding—metabolising the residues of what we have left behind.
About the artist.
Xin Liu is a London-based contemporary artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans installation, science, and technology. Working at the intersection of ecological systems, space research, and material processes, her work examines entropy, metabolism, and the afterlives of technological production. She is represented by Public Gallery, London, and has exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and esea contemporary, Manchester. Liu’s work is recognised for integrating scientific research with contemporary art, producing works that evolve through environmental and technological change.
Thresholds of Becoming, esea contemporary, Manchester
Until 17 May 2026
EXHAUST, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin
15 April – 11 October 2026
The Aural Sea, Venice Biennale
9 May – 22 November 2026
With thanks to Nicole Estilo Kaiser and Public Gallery, London.
