Artist Xin Liu believes the universe is like a diner: if you don’t tell the waiter what you want, how will they know to fire it in the kitchen? If you don't order, you're never going to eat—and that is why Liu always asks. Her prayers are not bigger or more absurd than other people’s, but they might be more specific. She’s not a pedant per se, just someone who likes poking holes in the expected to entertain herself and, hopefully, others too.
One of her wishes was to send one of her wisdom teeth to space, an homage to the Japanese anime series, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and her belief that if we ever leave this earth, it will be as something as cold and dead as the vacuum of space or a tooth. She checked off that dream in 2019 using Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket.
In 2020, she asked to see her X chromosome printed out like The Iliad to see how much data was being carried around in every single one of her cells. “32 gigabytes of text doesn’t even fit on a hard drive,” she giggles. Yet her whole studio is more or less made up of hard drives—at least this version of it: a temporary walled space inside New York’s 4 World Trade Center where she is a Silver Art Projects resident. We are looking out at a slice of downtown skyscrapers as she lists the institutions she’s crashed with over the recent stretch: Queens Museum, Pioneer Works, The Museum of Arts and Design. But her order of the moment isn’t another temporary laboratory, it’s a side of permanence, a place to call studio for real.
