Jen Liu, Pink Slime Caesar Shift (still), 2018. Single-channel 4K video, 24 minutes 20 seconds.
This post is part of a series marking the 40th anniversary of Paul Robeson Galleries. We are celebrating the artists who we have had the pleasure of working with over the last four decades, highlighting those artists who have inspired, provoked, challenged, and enriched our lives.
Artist
Artist Biography
Jen Liu is a visual artist born in 1976 that works in video, painting, biomaterial, sculpture, performance, and the reinterpretation of archival artifacts. Race and gender anxieties are revealed in seemingly neutral academic and industrial texts, while images, props, costumes, and animation take tropes to their extreme.[i]
Her video performances and paintings illustrate themes of labor, economy and exploring people’s natural identities. She is a 2019 recipient of the Creative Capital Award, 2018 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant, and the 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video as well as many other awards all around the world. She is currently part of the full time faculty at Bennington College.[ii]
About the Art
Jen Liu states that she wishes to embrace a materialist position through embodiments in physical form with her artwork. Including elements such as props, images, music and senses. She also states she wants to force economic and scientific research through cultures of past and present. In her project Pink Slime Caesar Shift she uses a series of videos and animations that tell the story of female factory workers in South China altering the DNA of cow cells to transmit messages. She also stated she will create wearable sculpture and accessories, and 3-D animations in order to further draw attention to the production of synthetic meat and the plight of female factory workers in South China.[iii]
1 “Pink Slime” http://jenliu.info/main.html#
2 “Pink Slime Caesar Shifts” https://creative-capital.org/projects/pink-slime-caesar-shift/
3 “A conversation with Jen Liu ‘ https://unframed.lacma.org/2019/10/14/pink-slime-caesar-shift-conversation-jen-liu—part-1
