Distance doesn’t really make the heart grow fonder. It makes it colder and harder. We can calculate that distance by our waning attention on events in faraway places, or our lack of curiosity about them. It’s present in our relationship to the objects that surround us, all of which have come from somewhere and been made by someone, but which we regard with indifference, as if they blipped into existence just for our use.
It’s this distance that artist Jen Liu is trying to bridge — through video work, sculpture, painting, augmented reality and dance — by summoning the ghostly presence of South China’s labor activists and female electronics workers. “If you don’t see the labor, they don’t exist,” she said at a recent screening at California College of the Arts. “And then they don’t suffer and you don’t have to fight for them.”
Liu’s newest body of work, GHOST__WORLD, has arrived in San Francisco as a Tanya Zimbardo-curated solo show at / (Slash) and two upcoming nights of dance performances at The Lab. Informing each are Liu’s primary sources: first-hand interviews with electronics and e-waste workers, and a mixture of articles and documents, like “Precious Metals Investment Terms A to Z” and “Health Consequences of Exposure to E-Waste: A Systematic Review.”
If this all sounds heavy, well, it is. But Liu also skillfully deploys tactics of humor and beauty. The / show, for instance, is filled with frogs. Last summer, people wearing inflatable “frog mother” costumes began appearing in the streets of China, selling frog balloons, issuing crisp military salutes and performing Buster Keaton-esque acts of physical comedy, both for the benefit of in-person audiences and viral online shares.
Designed by an artist frustrated with her job prospects, the frog costume appealed to Liu as a way of tying together multiple interests: the trend of “lying flat,” China’s youth opting out of over-work and ambition; the precarity of economic prospects outside of factory work; and previous incarnations of political performance art.
QR codes on the show’s walls activate “embedded” videos with found social media footage of the frog mothers. (You may find yourself developing a different relationship to your phone during this show.) On the exhibition’s largest screen, a looping video cycles through several days in a CG marshland, frogs bobbing between air and water, one jumping onto the back of a plane before it flies off. Large-scale, wonderfully textured and loopily cartoonish paintings on paper merge all the imagery of the show into surreal depictions of frog eyes, an unfortunate Clippy, office-appropriate pumps and manicured nails.
