May 6, 2025

She explores labor rights, with a particular focus on the convergence of feminist, environmental, and economic rights in the global south and especially for the Chinese diaspora.

“Those topics converge, particularly through interest in the past, industrial production, electronics production, and other forms of ubiquitous but invisible labor,” said Liu.

We caught up with her just after the opening of Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie at The Met, which includes her video The Land at the Bottom of the Sea. 

Please tell me about your inclusion in the exhibition Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie at The Met. 

The Land at the Bottom of the Sea is a video that was a commission for the Taipei Biennale in 2023. It is the culminating piece in Pink Slime Caesar Shift, which is a body of work I have been working on since 2016. This whole body of work was centered on my conversations with and translations of materials from labor rights activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in South China, particularly in the electronics factory zone around Shenzhen, but  based in Hong Kong due to the relative freedom of speech and organization.

Since 2019, though, the crackdown on those NGOs and activists by the Chinese government has been extremely severe. This has some disturbing echoes with what's going on right now in the U.S., particularly in academia. In 2020, I was still talking to the labor activists fairly frequently, while routing income from my editions to them. I like this idea of, as an artist, being able to not only work with activists and bring attention to their work, but also help support them financially. But by the end of 2021, there was almost no one to send money to; all their offices were closed. That’s where The Land at the Bottom of the Sea starts.

It starts with the term liquidation. Because, of course, all these NGOs had been liquidated. Many people had been disappeared. And in particular, I was interested in the story of Chan Yin Lam, an activist who was found drowned in Victoria Bay off of Hong Kong; there were a lot of nefarious theories about what happened to her. So her story was evocative to me, alongside the liquidation of all these NGOs. I took it all in an allegorical direction: if you are liquidated, do you literally sink to the bottom of the sea?  And if you sink to the bottom of the sea, will you meet mermaids there? If so, is it lovely? Is it not lovely? And in this case, it wasn't lovely. They will eat you, tear you up into bloody pieces.   

You refer to the video, the story, the props, and the subject matter, even, as a candy shell. Tell us about what’s at the center. 

When it comes to my work, is it about mermaids? Or the nature of work? Death by infrastructure? Death by toxic environmental and economic policies? It's all mixed up together: at its center, it’s about an entanglement of disparate areas of global production, bound together through material flows and capital networks, about revealing the consequences of global north consumption on the everyday lives of the workers who make it possible, and about the long term health consequences.

Another way to think about the “center” is that this piece itself is an object of encryption: it presents as a pretty video, but it’s actually a covert archive. Any image file, like a JPEG, is a container of data: the image that you see. But each file has some empty space, and within that empty space, you can stuff another image. So each video frame has another image packed into it: the entire video contains thousands of images of ten recently-disappeared female activists in China, screenshots of their online posts and vlog transcripts, etc.  With simple instructions, you  can unpack the entire archive to your own computer. It's classic spy stuff. Information about activists is being scrubbed out of the internet daily. So this piece is an attempt to find a way to preserve the memory of these women in a form that is safe from tampering, yet easy to digitally distribute.

This is similar, in a way, to your work with DNA and gene editing. 

Yes! I started thinking seriously about working with DNA work when I was trying to figure out ways to put technology to use for grassroots purposes. I mean, there's hacker culture, which is often about tearing down the system: but can we disrupt systems in other ways? Redirect the purposes of genetic engineering, find ways to use it to help somebody who is not normally benefited by that science. It uses genetically modified stem-cells as a vehicle to covertly transmit messages of labor insurrection for Special Economic Zone (SEZ) factory workers in China. 

You recently won the Anonymous Was A Woman Grant. How do you plan to use the $50,000?

It's going toward paying for two productions. I'm still thinking about forms of invisible labor, and I'm also still invested in the untold stories of Chinese women in diaspora. 

For the first production, I've been doing a lot of research into the first 50 years of the migration of Chinese women into America, who primarily came in as sex workers. Sex work by undocumented migrants is a form of labor that has to erase all traces of its existence in order to continue. As the primary economic and social function of Chinese women for half of a century, it's a seldom told story. In other words, it’s buried history: and as with many buried histories, strange outcomes result. Forms of violence, including ongoing structural exploitation, are hard to understand without this history, such as anti-Asian violence during COVID, especially the Atlanta shootings. 

On the other side of that, I'm continuing to think quite a lot about data labor or electronic labor. For the last year, I've been thinking more and working more about digital data labor, the people who do things like define cats and dogs for AI. You still need a human in the loop. It’s deeply underpaid labor, and like the 19th century sex workers, it has to erase all traces of its existence in order to succeed. These AI systems have to seem as if they're perfect, efficient, and well designed, so you still need a ton of underpaid labor that is totally invisible and not employed properly by any company to project this fallacy. There’s something about subordinating your entire body in unbearable working conditions in order to what? Help someone generate a fake AI kitten pic or other really stupid desires.  

Between those two forms of labor, there's a very strange space: I think about Cronenberg’s The Fly telepod as a time machine: you travel through time as invisible labor, but you’re also transformed, deep down into your cells. 

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie is on view now through August 17, 2025, at The Met Fifth Avenue in Galleries 963–965.