Jen Liu

Sound description: lapping water, dunking frogs in water, metal parts fitted together

In Bottoms (OnO), a series of butts with faces painted on them march in place. A tribute to Yoko Ono's Bottoms, it imagines a society in which equals walk towards a future of their own making.

BBBitches! is constructed of stop-motion, 3D animation, and found footage set to a soundtrack of 'estranged' audio, as a transmission from a world that has evolved beyond our understanding.

Firsthand accounts of industrial workers and worker poetry are embedded within other nonfiction sources, woven into a melancholic elegy alongside a visual narrative depicting failed social encounters with mermaids. Packed within its digital body is an assembled archive of disappeared women activists, tens of thousands of digital proofs of the existence of fighting women, preserved against the dissolution of memory.

Two videos are projected on two walls of the small viewing space. The videos present two classes from a reorganized future society—the Crunch Division and the Peace Division. The people of the Crunch Division wear strange uniforms and do peculiar, regimented exercises to the blinking and buzzing of a red light. The people of the Peace Division sit and lay on the ground lackadaisically in empty hallways and rooms, and sip water out of extremely long straws.

"In factories, everyone has their place. Western industrial production is a site of magical thinking: an old history that will never return, an idealized construction that never really was. It's impossible to know what the true costs would be if it were to return - societal, environmental, and psychological – and yet, entire political campaigns are built around this. This piece speculates on re-industrialization, and is a sequel to my 2013 video, Safety First (Bad, Don’t Touch, Mercy!). Like its prequel, it posits a non-specific future populated by female factory workers. The geometric aesthetics of power and the romance of industrial-era alienation, are paired with theoretical and fictional texts about alternate social economies. Video footage was shot in Ohio, animation and soundtrack by the artist. Voiceover text sources include Industrial supply catalogs, OSHA safety manuals, Monique Wittig’s Les Guerilleres, and Adorno’s Minima Moralia." -Taken from Jen Liu's Vimeo page.

The Pink Detachment is an update of “The Red Detachment of Women” (1964), a Model Opera from China’s Cultural Revolution. Here the protagonists are an accident-prone worker and a ballerina-manager who has the tools to alleviate the worker’s problems. At the center of the piece is the color equation, Red + White = Pink, from which multiple parallel meanings emerge. The first is the old term “pinko,” meaning a watered down Communism, or a liberal with uncommitted Red sympathies. The second is a proposal to solve future crises in meat supply by re-valuating hot dog and sausage production as a solution, by integrating ‘undesirable’ portions of pig with the ‘desirable’ portions, embodying perfect equivalence in consumable form. And the third is pink as femininity – not as a ‘natural’ fleshy softness, but rather a synthetic, engineered (and potentially violent) hybridity.

Four womxn form a labor circuit, generating electricity for cheap gadgets: Their biopower powers the infinitely disposable. This piece is named for electroporation—a method of genetic engineering in which cells are electroshocked into compliance—and is inspired by Fred Ho and Ann T. Green’s Warrior Sisters: The New Adventures of African and Asian Womyn Warriors (2000). In the original, Fa Mulan, Nana Yaa Asantewaa, and Sieh King King rescue Assata Shakur from jail, using the lightning power of Mulan to travel through time and space. Here, that power has been absorbed into the network grid, a form of entrapment instead of liberation. Non-fiction voiceover texts include a firsthand account of the female carceral data labor complex: prisoners busy at data entry for ADP/UNICOR.