Jen Liu

In her research-based work, Jen Liu fabricates speculative narratives to contest dominant accounts of the past and present. The Land at the Bottom of the Sea (2023) is the last chapter of Pink Slime Caesar Shift, a multi-year body of work in a variety of mediums. Throughout the project, Liu has experimented with new technologies, such as genetic engineering and food biotech, to create alternative networks for labor activism in South China.

Over the last few years, numerous Chinese female activists and NGO leaders have disappeared. Key figures have been purged from the internet, media posts about them and contextual information made irretrievable. In this last chapter, the artist probes what happens if you are bound to be liquidated–financially, socially, politically. Under what conditions is it possible to survive?

The Land at the Bottom of the Sea is a video composed of live-action sequences and 3D animation. It begins with multiple custom-built AI voices who each try to complete this sentence:  “The day I was liquidated, I ….” One of the voices is trained on the stories of Chinese women known as Fishing Sisters. These migrant workers, who came to urban factories from the countryside, were part of what has been pejoratively called the Blind Flood. This term was used primarily in Mainland China in the 1950s to refer to migrant labor from villages in general.

The work goes on to consider the failure of NGOs to survive in the face of overwhelming governmental forces, and the failure of techno-optimism to provide solutions to concrete environmental and social problems. Meanwhile, Liu’s artwork offers itself as an alternative form of activist survival: the video file is itself an encrypted digital archive. Available for online download (and from the QR code attached), the video can be unpacked by users to access a cascade of images, texts, and videos about Chinese women who have been recently politically disappeared, or found dead in the water.