Featured Art Notes

"Pink Slime Caesar Shift: Gold Edition"

Jen Liu, wearing white, poses with arm extended in a bright pink/magenta painted room

Faculty member Jen Liu was included in the 2019 Singapore Biennale, Every Step In the Right Direction. Liu exhibited Pink Slime Caesar Shift: Gold Edition—a suite of live performances, video, set design, installation, and paintings that reflect on the value and nature of gold.

They investigate gold-particle genetic engineering, gold as a principle of wealth, labour and trade, and how one’s body and fate can be altered by ingesting gold. Part of an ongoing series, this component explores biolistics, a method of shooting gold microparticles into cell walls to introduce a string of synthetic DNA into a cell organism. Installed at the Asian Civilisations Museum, the presentation extends the artist’s interest to activate a conversation with collections, archival artifacts, and notions of display. Liu’s work has been widely exhibited this year. She had pieces included in Migration Narratives at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, Korea; the 2019 Lishui International Photography Festival in Lishui City, Zhejiang Province, China; the San Diego Asian Film Festival; Red Bull Arts Detroit’s traveling exhibition, Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying; The Art Gallery at Pace University; and Feast & Famine” at Main Gallery, Express Newark, among others. Liu joined the faculty in 2019. She works with video, choreographic performance, biomaterial, and painting to explore topics of national identity, gendered economies, neoliberal industrial labour, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts. She has presented work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and the New Museum (New York), Royal Academy and ICA (London), as well as the Shanghai Biennale (2014), among others. She is also a recipient of the Creative Capital Award (2019) and Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video (2017).