At this year’s Frieze London, Public Gallery presented a solo booth by London-based Chinese artist Xin Liu. Her installation, Insomnia, unfolds as a living system — a meditation on plants, food, circulation, and the human body as parts of one interconnected organism.
At the booth’s centre, there is a tank with water, where a green, moss-like aquatic plant called duckweed grows across the surface. Along the side of the tank, the thick viscous liquid flows down through two horizontal towers. Above, a bright grow light beams down, sustaining the plants throughout the fair. On the surrounding walls, there are four pieces of her encaustic works, made from beeswax and tree resin – ancient materials reimagined through a futuristic lens. Beneath the wax’s translucent surface, Liu embeds threads and organic fibres that look like growing plants, also look like our blood vessels, root system and female body. These works echo the living system in the tank, breathing together with the duckweed.
Duckweed is often a problem in ponds and nature parks where it forms dense mats on the water’s surface, blocking sunlight, reducing oxygen levels, and thriving at the expense of other forms of life. However, recent scientific studies have identified it as a potential candidate for the future of organic fuel and food production in outer space.
With a background in mechanical engineering and space science, Liu sent her work to the International Space Station a few years ago and explored topics such as biological preservation and data memory. These projects are far more than simple explorations of outer space, but more of her philosophical reflections on the sustenance of life and the meaning of existence.
She reimagines “nature” through the lens of technofeminism and explores the complex structure of female identity and subjectivity through interdisciplinary practice. Her work also questions the conditions of human existence and the reconfiguration of identity and social structures—just as duckweed can be used as fuel or food, the exhaust gases we emit may also give birth to a generative future.
Overall, Insomnia at the Frieze London is a self-sustaining ecosystem. It intertwines the complex relationship between nature and artificiality, body and technology. The work transforms the growth process of duckweed into a model of circulation and control, suggesting the dependence and contradictions exposed by humans in trying to reconstruct nature. At the ecological level, it simulates an artificially maintained environment, revealing the fragile balance between natural and technological systems. In the context of technology and post-humanity, the work points to the extension of life forms, when machines and organisms depend on each other, “survival” becomes a cross-species process. From a feminist perspective, the reproduction of duckweed and the organisational structure in beeswax paintings together constitute a reinterpretation of “maternal nature”, involving the politics of identity, body, and reproduction. In an existential sense, Insomnia symbolises a state of continuous operation: both ecosystems and human societies are in a cycle that cannot be dormant. At the material level, the dynamic changes of liquid, light and wax form a temporal sculpture that continuously generates the work at the perceptual level. Through the interweaving of these layers, Liu’s work does not provide answers, but rather establishes a framework of thinking that allows the viewer to re-examine the relationship between life and technology, nature and institutions.
