A pair of lips, pouting, is lightly dusted in a layer of freezing ice crystals, floating in the middle of a framed “canvas” of silicon. Evoking the misty cloud of exhaled breath on a cold morning, this cast bronze piece, entitled The Mothership (2023), doesn’t just look frozen, it is frozen. “I want it to be not just visually cold, but physically freezing. So I made a sculpture with a cooling mechanism to generate a layer of frost,” said artist Xin Liu, who cast the sculpture using her own mouth.
This chilly work was inspired by scientific techniques involving freezing the body, in both real and futuristic applications. “Cryogenics, used to achieve immortality in science fiction, is the same technology women use to extend their reproductive abilities in real life—that tension is really interesting to me,” Liu explained in a Zoom interview with Artsy from her home in London. Recently, her installation, video, and sculptural work, which often considers the body and identity through the lens of technology, has taken off internationally, mirroring a growing interest in art that explores the great scientific issues of our time.
