Plastic Time

Annette An-Jen Liu:

I’d like to start off with the work’s remains. How much disintegration occurred over the exhibition’s duration of 4-5 weeks? Were you surprised by any of it?

Xin Liu:

The work is about plastic degradation and thinking about how we are pushing to create something that never disappears but also trying to create organisms to eat exactly that indestructible material. So, scientifically speaking, this process is really an engineering problem: If you’re using virgin plastic, meaning the plastic that just comes out of factories, it will be a lot faster because of the heating process. However, the more you heat and reform and mold the plastic, the more it becomes rigid and harder for the enzyme to chew on it.

Scientifically speaking, the enzyme we developed is quite effective. It could degrade plastic around day two, with the right ratio and at the right temperature. However, in the exhibition, we were doing things off-script. First, I used post-consumer plastic like olive oil bottles and soap containers, materials where I don’t even know what the plastic went through. We didn’t know what kind of plastic would work better but knew that it would definitely degrade a lot slower. We also couldn’t have the temperature as high as is required, and I couldn’t plenish the enzyme as dense as it would be in a laboratory, because I wanted the plastic to be submerged in the tank for its visual presentation.

At the same time, adding a lot more enzymes would be quite expensive to produce, biologically speaking, because you have to do all the work in the laboratory. To summarize, the process of degradation is almost like what happens if you use soap. It’s more like a rubbing, a surface reaction. 

One of the most visible things you start seeing is some dust in the tank, and you see the plastic lose its shine, but the structure is almost intact. This process would have to go through many shows to fully degrade, but that also depends on the temperature and whether I can have enough enzyme to continue the reaction. It could take months to years for this to fully happen. People were really wanting a demonstration of how effective the enzyme is, so I included a smaller work, the flag, where I have much less plastic and it’s inside an incubator at 60°C. That one’s totally deformed, and it was very visible.

I find it quite fascinating, you know, all these conflicting conversations about the process is very much what the work is about. The science of it proves how efficient, innovative, and capable we are in manipulating time and material. On the other hand, there is this weird thing around art and culture. People say, I want to see how it’s degrading, but at the same time, as an artwork they’re like, what if it disappears? Can you still show it again like? How does the collector maintain the work? But plastic is the most impossible thing to make disappear on Earth!

There was an interesting challenge and excitement of showing the work in an art context. Even having conversations with the gallery, who were like, how are we going to do the insurance? 

AL:

That was my following question, about considering the work in a commercial context. In the Frieze review about the show, the author likened the work to durational performance, describing the collection of this intangible piece as acquiring its “afterlife.” How would you respond to that, this idea of the work’s lifespan?

XL:

I think that’s quite important. We have forgotten how everything needs to be maintained, regardless of its monetary value. You have to figure out how to take care of things, like taking care of a plant and your house… It kind of bugs me when there’s this resistance, where people think, “if I want to have something that I bought, it should just last forever.” But nothing’s like that, though we have been taught to think otherwise because of consumer culture. 

I have been thinking a lot about this question as an artist, working in sculpture and material conservation and thinking about what happens with the work when it leaves storage. 

But it’s also about communicating that act of care to others. How do you develop the relationship with people, so they are invested? So that even their kids and grandchildren have time and interest to take care of something?

AL:

I see an interesting contrast in this work to your previous explorations where you touch on time in different ways. For example, in Seedlings and Offspring (2023), you’re examining the technologies that disrupt or interfere with natural life cycles. Whereas here, the biologist you collaborated with, Erika Erickson, described the enzyme as one that mimics the natural process of plastic degradation. Could you speak to how these different approaches to time manifest in your work—particularly in this current project, where enzymatic intervention draws out the timeline in ways that remain uncertain and dependent on many variables?

XL:

I feel like what we developed is still such an achievement, even if it will take three or five years, it’s still 100 times faster than letting the plastic degrade on its own because normally, with post-consumer plastics, it takes 3 to 500 years to decompose, so what’s the worry about it not being fast enough? I found it intriguing to have to justify it sometimes with audiences, but I also get it because it speaks to this “tyranny of science” that looms over, and an assumption that anything technological or scientific must be fast and immediate.

In this work particularly, it was also quite interesting that at the beginning when we were collecting the plastic, I thought it was going to take forever but it was way faster. So there was also this uncertainty where the things I was expecting to be fast was actually much slower, and the slower things were made faster.

AL:

The series title borrows from writer Geoff Manaugh’s great essay, Fables of the Permanent and Insatiable (2018/2020), where he describes haunting material possessions and the counter consumption forces. I noticed in your artist statement for “Self-devourer” (2023), you also describe being an artist as consuming, with an “insatiable appetite… becoming [a] relentless creature consuming herself.”  In what ways do you continue to draw the parallel between this narrative of material consumption/material science with that of being an artist?

XL:

That’s a really good question. I feel like being an artist is such a weird profession, because we’re constantly doing what to other people’s eyes is self-indulgence. I think that has a lot to do with this idea of appetite, and I think that’s what everyone struggles with, versus this kind of idea of a disciplined person. I think there’s some animal instinct that we all have and that we’re really trying to manage. As an artist, it’s about how to channel that energy into creating. That’s something I find to be really, really fortunate to be able to in my practice, but also times I do feel quite exhausted by myself. 

AL:

I want to touch on the topic of scale. The themes of space exploration and biopolitics in your past works I think lend themselves to macro interpretations with its expansive subject. Whereas The Permanent and Insatiable presents a micro-level focus with its defining miniature cityscapes and enzymes that aren’t visible to the naked eye.

XL:

I think for me, one of the most satisfactory processes is actually moving between the macro and micro dimensions. I think my practice exists within this of space, it’s where I find lots of meaning. 

For the world of The Permanent and the Insatiable, I was thinking about a disappearing city. When I did the film, The White Stone (2021), about hunting for rocket debris in rural and desert areas in China, I actually encountered a city that was pretty much in ruins. It was an entire city that seemed to be sucked dry. But normally when a city disappears, it’s more of a natural process, where it gradually gets abandoned before falling apart, but then people move to other areas, so a disappearing city is only ever partially “dead”—its timeline is visible. Take Rome, for example. If you dig down, you see cities building on top of each other. There’s a record of time in the city.

But contemporary cities, which are built very fast for industrial reasons, disappear almost immediately. That’s the type of city I encountered. It was an oil city, so it was built very homogeneously, very well structured, but then after the oil dried up, everything was gone, almost overnight. The city’s decay also happened homogeneously. It was quite terrifying, but at the same time, I grew up hearing people talking about this in my oil hometown, about how there would be only 50 years left or so, because the oil would eventually dry up in that time frame. 

So, I was always thinking about how a city dies, and how one would know. The first edition I did was at Houston for the Moody Center for the Art, in a city with also a history of oil. For the one in New York, I chose the financial district because I think there’s so much of that part of downtown that is artificial to my eye.

AL:

Can you speak more to that? With this iteration of and in New York, how did constructing a miniature version of it influence your understanding of the city? 

XL:

Well, I lived in New York for quite a while before I went to London and I did this residency right before COVID at the Queens Museum, so I have a fond memory of the panorama—the most insane, beautiful miniature. I think there’s something there for me. I was always like, I want a version of that myself! 

When I lived in downtown New York, on a top floor on Grand Street, I had this view of downtown, of the river and everything, so I’ve been looking at the city from that angle for a while. Choosing to recreate it for the exhibition was a simple decision. I feel like lots of times, life would give me the answer, without me realizing it.

AL:

Obviously this series of works stemmed from your research in 2018 that you initiated and led. After two installations, how do you envision incorporating the enzymes into your growing practice and research? Are there new ways you hope to use it? 

XL:

There are a few things I really want to do. With this series, we really developed this weaving technique to make these structures. Everything was handmade in the studio, we experimented a lot and figured out a way to build with post-consumer plastics, which are inherently bendy, so the weaving helped create a more rigid surface for us. This is one thing I’d really want to develop more of, as well as to make customized containers to be able to have like works hang on the wall. It’d be easier for display.

Additionally, I’ve been looking at some other new materials doing similar things, because this whole series is really about the tension of material science and biotech, but even beyond this discipline, about how we’re trying to create opposite forces while maintaining this very delicate balance in the world.