Jen Liu

"In factories, everyone has their place. Western industrial production is a site of magical thinking: an old history that will never return, an idealized construction that never really was. It's impossible to know what the true costs would be if it were to return - societal, environmental, and psychological – and yet, entire political campaigns are built around this. This piece speculates on re-industrialization, and is a sequel to my 2013 video, Safety First (Bad, Don’t Touch, Mercy!). Like its prequel, it posits a non-specific future populated by female factory workers. The geometric aesthetics of power and the romance of industrial-era alienation, are paired with theoretical and fictional texts about alternate social economies. Video footage was shot in Ohio, animation and soundtrack by the artist. Voiceover text sources include Industrial supply catalogs, OSHA safety manuals, Monique Wittig’s Les Guerilleres, and Adorno’s Minima Moralia." -Taken from Jen Liu's Vimeo page.

The Pink Detachment is an update of “The Red Detachment of Women” (1964), a Model Opera from China’s Cultural Revolution. Here the protagonists are an accident-prone worker and a ballerina-manager who has the tools to alleviate the worker’s problems. At the center of the piece is the color equation, Red + White = Pink, from which multiple parallel meanings emerge. The first is the old term “pinko,” meaning a watered down Communism, or a liberal with uncommitted Red sympathies. The second is a proposal to solve future crises in meat supply by re-valuating hot dog and sausage production as a solution, by integrating ‘undesirable’ portions of pig with the ‘desirable’ portions, embodying perfect equivalence in consumable form. And the third is pink as femininity – not as a ‘natural’ fleshy softness, but rather a synthetic, engineered (and potentially violent) hybridity.

CAUGHT RED HANDED / THINKING ORANGE / CATATONIC YELLOW / GREEN HORN / FEELING BLUE / APOPLECTIC VIOLET: DEATH WALKS IN HIGH HEELS!

Four womxn form a labor circuit, generating electricity for cheap gadgets: Their biopower powers the infinitely disposable. This piece is named for electroporation—a method of genetic engineering in which cells are electroshocked into compliance—and is inspired by Fred Ho and Ann T. Green’s Warrior Sisters: The New Adventures of African and Asian Womyn Warriors (2000). In the original, Fa Mulan, Nana Yaa Asantewaa, and Sieh King King rescue Assata Shakur from jail, using the lightning power of Mulan to travel through time and space. Here, that power has been absorbed into the network grid, a form of entrapment instead of liberation. Non-fiction voiceover texts include a firsthand account of the female carceral data labor complex: prisoners busy at data entry for ADP/UNICOR.

Firsthand accounts of industrial workers and worker poetry are embedded within other nonfiction sources, woven into a melancholic elegy alongside a visual narrative depicting failed social encounters with mermaids. Packed within its digital body is an assembled archive of disappeared women activists, tens of thousands of digital proofs of the existence of fighting women, preserved against the dissolution of memory.

Pink Slime Caesar Shift

Pink Slime Caesar Shift: Gold Loop reflects on the disappearance of labor activists in China, the resulting possibilities of political resistance, and e-waste (old computers, cell phones, and other domestic electronics). Firsthand accounts of female electronics workers in South China are cut together with corporate and industrial texts to investigate the physical, legal, and biochemical realities of gold extraction from e-waste. Live action video and animation explore the psychogeography of “virtuous” first-world recycling vs third-world biopolitical devastation. Themes of mirroring, mutation, and disintegration are grounded in considering electronics that poison bodies in their initial production as well as in their return for disassembly, an infernal eternal return, a “gold loop.”

Referencing the Cloud—a cyber-infrastructure that stores our memories and data through seemingly remote servers that are in fact powered by an unseen network of humans—the exhibition featured recent and new videos, paintings, and mixed-media animatronics, speculating on the myth of virtualized labor through a postcolonial feminist lens.

Two videos are projected on two walls of the small viewing space. The videos present two classes from a reorganized future society—the Crunch Division and the Peace Division. The people of the Crunch Division wear strange uniforms and do peculiar, regimented exercises to the blinking and buzzing of a red light. The people of the Peace Division sit and lay on the ground lackadaisically in empty hallways and rooms, and sip water out of extremely long straws.

The protagonist sits at a vanity table in an empty room, with her back to us. A computer generated voice talks about the circle, square, triangle, line, and dot. Found footage and animation reflect the shapes. These shapes are also painted on her face, and she paints over them, one by one. When she is done, she dances towards a dark doorway, while animated shapes deconstruct, re-organizing themselves as stripes.

In split-screen. a factory laborer is at work, one representing good, the other, bad. Safety conditions are violated by the bad worker - and then dream sequences bring to life nightmarish Romanian factory safety posters from the 1970s.

BBBitches! is constructed of stop-motion, 3D animation, and found footage set to a soundtrack of 'estranged' audio, as a transmission from a world that has evolved beyond our understanding.

In Bottoms (OnO), a series of butts with faces painted on them march in place. A tribute to Yoko Ono's Bottoms, it imagines a society in which equals walk towards a future of their own making.

The Red Detachment of Women is a celebration of two worlds that almost exist. The first is a tropical paradise inhabited by female soldiers, as imagined in Madame Mao’s The Red Detachment of Women (ballet film: 1970). In her Red Detachment, a peasant girl undergoes a political awakening: the homicidal rage directed at her landlord is tamed, and she becomes a regulated, productive military agent. The second is an all-women state-of-the-art industrial pork processing plant, accommodating both Chinese factories’ preference for female workers with the latest in scientific management techniques.

This animation accompanies Part 1 of Pink Slime Caesar Shift: Transfection Ring (Industrial Poisoning Labor Rights). The Transfection Ring is a piece of brass jewelry with a small interior chamber that stores beef cells genetically altered to contain labor law on the rights of workers in case of industrial poisoning. These altered cells glow fluorescent green, beacons waiting in the darkness, for their future readers to come.

Sound description: lapping water, dunking frogs in water, metal parts fitted together