Jen Liu: GHOST__WORLD (through August 24, 2024) features new videos, augmented reality, paintings, and glass sculptures. The exhibition coincides withGHOST__WORLD: a performance for 4 dancers (April 27 and 28), organizedby the nonprofit / (Slash) and co-presented with The Lab in San Francisco. It isamong the first of ten Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions for Media Arts topremiere in the Bay Area.
"Frogs began to appear everywhere. Wearing inflatable frog costumes, unlicensed street vendors in China last year became a social media sensation as “frog mothers” selling their “babies” of frog-shaped balloons. Frog mothers are not only the cartoonish and sad-looking anonymous mascots of an economic downturn, but intriguing figures of political resistance in the face of state oppression.
Viral videos of frog mothers pop up in this exhibition through augmented reality (AR) for mobile devices. GHOST__WORLD premieres a new body of work— Web AR, videos, paintings, and sculptures—alongside select pieces from Jen Liu’s multifaceted Pink Slime Caesar Shift (2016–present). Both projects originate from the New York-based artist’s long-term engagement with labor activism and women workers in electronics and e-waste in South China—in which realities such as NGO liquidation and disappeared labor activists converge in research-based fictions.
What if our mobile phones were haunted by the invisible workers who made them? GHOST__WORLD and its companion performance commission GHOST__WORLD: a performance for 4 dancers, takes a speculative approach to this possibility, while speaking to histories of violence against women workers and diasporic Asians alike, “the greater violence of compression in a digital existence.”
-- Tanya Zimbardo, guest curator
"At Slash, viral “frog mothers” are “lying flat”* — so flatthey’ve become graphics, the sibylline blobs of the iPhone 15 adcampaign.
Social malaise blurs with political resistance in the face ofstate oppression. iPhone boxes converge with old stories ofChinese wives smuggled in shipping crates. Images of femme glamoremerge with ghostly edges, or as fragments. Mischief becomes ashell for histories of violence against electronic workers anddiasporic Asians alike; body parts superimposed on the viewer’svisual field through Web AR speak to the possibility of beinghaunted by the workers making the phones, and the greaterviolence of compression in a digital existence." -- Jen Liu
*Lying Flat, 躺平, describes disillusioned Chinese youths andworkers, who’ve opted out of over-work and ambition to merelyexist in the face of diminished social and economic prospects.The CCP restricts mention of the term online.
Jen Liu (she/they) is a New York-based visual artist working in video, painting, performance, sculpture and biomaterial, on diasporic Asian identities, postcolonial economies, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts. In her most recent work, she’s used genetic engineering and dark encryption to reframe firsthand accounts of electronics workers, and created semi-speculative scripts from corporate brochures and industrial manuals. She is a professor of film/video at Bennington College as well as a regular visiting critic in Columbia University’s Visual Arts MFA.