A delicate green mat drifts across a steel tank, a small, fast-replicating plant called duckweed spreading unchecked, its growth both mesmerizing and menacing. On Earth, it is often treated as a nuisance, clogging waterways and suffocating other life. Yet recent research envisions it as a tool for survival in outer space—fuel and sustenance for humans beyond our planet. If growth, preservation, and reproduction can be engineered, what becomes of the natural rhythms they once followed? And when systems, organisms, or objects outlive their intended function, what does their lingering reveal about human ambition, control, and the unseen metabolic currents of our world?

In Xin Liu’s work, this tension is not merely scientific, but ethical, ecological, and poetic. “Lots of the projects I do are world-building and storytelling, rather than object-making,” says the London-based artist and engineer. Combining space exploration, biotechnology, and data manipulation, her practice constructs narratives in which materials, systems, and temporalities remain in flux. Rather than imagining futures, she attends to what technology already does—how it consumes, transforms, exhausts, and accumulates. She calls this long-term trajectory Cosmic Metabolism: a framework she arrived at retrospectively. “When I looked back, this is what I see I have been interested in,” Liu reflects. “Cosmic metabolism is something that I found quite fascinating because I’ve been always interested in this tension between change and permanence and the scale of human life versus the rational understanding of the entire cosmos.” In her works, technology is not an instrument of control but an organism already breaking down. What matters is not the moment of launch or invention, but what follows: debris, unreadable code, exhausted materials, and systems that continue operating past their intended lifespan. Here, exhaust is not failure—it is evidence.

For Liu, this framework also grapples with scale. “We are living in a world where we deal with three meals a day,” she notes, “but also imagine thousands of years of humanity. Do we feel empowered or like dust?” Her work occupies this unstable position between the immediate and the cosmic, where human life oscillates between agency and insignificance.

Across her practice, Liu repeatedly returns to this residue. Rocket fragments, corrupted data streams, plastics dissolving through enzymatic digestion, and reproductive technologies stretched beyond biological limits appear as parallel outputs of technological desire. Productivity gives way to afterlife; achievement leaves behind remainder. Without naming ecological cost or extractive logic directly, Liu allows these systems to reveal their own imbalance—how overproduction, rather than scarcity, becomes the defining pressure.

This tension is sharply articulated in Insomnia, a kinetic sculptural ecosystem staging growth as both promise and threat. A rectangular steel tank holds duckweed, a fast-replicating aquatic plant often treated as invasive due to its dense mats that block sunlight and deplete oxygen. Two horizontal towers release a thick, viscous liquid in continuous threads, introducing an artificial rhythm of stimulation into the system.

Duckweed occupies a paradoxical position in contemporary science: a biological nuisance on Earth, yet increasingly explored as a potential source of food and fuel for long-term space missions. In Insomnia, Liu holds this tension in delicate balance. Growth is relentless but unsustainable; fertility becomes pressure rather than abundance, while the continuous rainfall of viscous liquid signals technological insistence. The work asks how natural processes are reshaped under constant optimization, and what risks emerge when efficiency overrides ecological and systemic balance.

If Insomnia examines overproduction as metabolic strain, Liu’s series of mixed-media sculptures Cry:0 approaches the opposite: suspension. Sculptural forms embedded with cooling systems cause frost to form across surfaces, referencing cryonics and egg freezing—technologies that interrupt life cycles in the name of preservation. The works also evoke research into subglacial lakes in Antarctica and ice-covered moons, where probes search for traces of ancient life.

In Cry:0, life is neither allowed to grow nor decay; it is held in escrow. Preservation appears as care but enacts control. Freezing biological processes postpones the future rather than resolving it. Seen alongside Insomnia, Cry:0 functions as metabolic prehistory: an earlier attempt to manage life by slowing it down, contrasting with later pressures to accelerate and multiply. Both gestures—excess and suspension—reveal how technological systems intervene in life’s rhythms, often denying the possibility of change altogether.

The pressure of technological systems becomes intimate in Liu’s Encaustic Series, where scale shifts from ecosystem to body. Composed of beeswax and tree resin, materials historically associated with permanence, works such as Towards the Light (2025) adopt an ancient technique while refusing traditional portraiture or landscape. Embedded silk threads form branching networks resembling roots, fossilized plants, or capillaries beneath the skin.

Here, the body is treated as terrain—mapped, structured, and constrained. Drawing inspiration from Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Liu examines how female identity is shaped by biological and cultural demands. Modern agriculture forces plants to flower and fruit unnaturally; the female body is often caught between ideals of freedom and regimes of control. By refusing figuration and rendering the self through material code, Liu questions the limits of self-authorship in an age of boundless data and perpetual advancement.

Across her practice, Liu’s engagement with science is neither symbolic nor distant. Trained as an engineer and drawing on her experience as founding Arts Curator of the Space Exploration Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, as well as her role as Visiting Fellow at Cornell Tech (2024-25), she has led payloads to the International Space Station, launched suborbital experiments, and worked directly within scientific laboratories. These sites become spaces of speculation rather than proof, and her critique emerges from proximity rather than refusal. “I think the so-called high tech is a façade,” she observes. “Everything boils down to simple ideas in physics and math. It’s about whether we understand technology or not. There’s no separation between human life and technology.”

Time in Liu’s work resists linearity. Her sculptures are not oriented toward the future nor nostalgic for the past. They occupy recursive, suspended, entropic temporalities. Space appears not as a horizon but as an archive cluttered with debris, frozen matter, and fading signals. The future, in this view, is already overgrown.

Cosmic Metabolism operates not as a theme, but as a method—long-term, iterative, and unresolved. It links space science, biology, data systems, and human desire into a single circuit, tracing how technological life sustains itself and where it begins to fail. Returning to the circulating residue—the overgrown tank, the frozen surface, the satellite transmitting past relevance—Liu’s work offers neither spectacle nor transcendence. Instead, it testifies to a world in which systems, human and technological alike, learn too late to coexist with their own limits. In her hands, decay, suspension, and excess are not endings, but evidence of life in flux, and of the intricate, often unseen metabolic currents that shape the world around us.

Text by Chantel Shiah, Asian Art Contemporary
Image courtesy of the artist and Public Gallery, London

Website: https://xinliu.art/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/xin_liu_studio/