This week at Frieze LA, Make Room Gallery will present artist Xin Liu’s solo series The Theater of Metamorphoses at Focus LA. At booth F04, Liu will create an enveloping installation that features mixed-media sculptures and wall art. Here, viewers are immersed in a figurative sacrificial ceremony, acting as an extension of the artist's fascination with life, transcendence, and humanity’s practice of utilizing technology to achieve immortality, or rather, creating loopholes in the natural cycle of life. 

Liu’s triptych The Theater of Metamorphoses, which the series is centered around, considers the push and pull between the polarities of life: the hard endurance it takes for any living thing to survive, considered against the ever-looming reality of imminent death. 

Influenced by the meticulous design of bones, bone structure, and dragon-like spine patterns, this particular work includes sculptures of a human mouth, illuminated by frost-emitting technology. A cooling mechanism built into the piece creates a frost atop the mouth's exteriors, evoking imagery of the ice-covered oceans that exist on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, or Antarctica’s buried lakes. Within this frost, Liu metamorphosizes our search for ancient, alien life, and considers what she coins "aesthetics of failure" or, the intrinsic flaws that arrive when attempting to use human technology to conserve, maintain, and progress beyond what might otherwise be destined to tarnish. 

Liu is a multidisciplinary artist and engineer, using her knowledge of sciences to create works and experiments that ponder on our personal, social, and technological inclinations against the abstract. Ahead of Frieze, we spoke with the artist on her upcoming presentation, her artistic processes, technological advancements, and humanity’s ever-existing lust for never-ending life.

What does your creative/artistic practice look like? What did the evolution of The Theater of Metamorphoses see from ideation to execution, and how long has it been in the making?

My work is heavily research-based. I find inspiration anywhere in life, books, nature, science, people, and philosophy. I often encounter a topic of interest and spend years developing the work, through reading and making. My latest piece at Frieze LA, The Theatre of Metamorphosis, serves as a cornerstone for my most recent development in the Cry:O series.

Cry:O has been nearly two years in the making, with this particular piece taking shape over eight months last year. The series explores cryogenics—a technology often depicted in science fiction as a means of prolonging life. It wasn’t until my 30s that I realized the same technology is used in egg freezing, a realization that emerged while I was researching and reflecting on my own reproductive possibilities. The forms of the sculptures serve as annotations on the ways living organisms have been altered through biotechnologies. This spans from traditional practices like selective breeding and crossbreeding plants to modern biotechnologies that allow us to modify genetic information directly. The sculptures reflect the many transformations that living organisms undergo through human intervention.

As both an artist and engineer, how do you believe art and science complement one another? Being immersed in each field, do you find similarities between the two that others might not recognize?

I like to think back to a time when knowledge wasn’t confined by strict disciplines. Before the Renaissance, someone could be an alchemist, a philosopher, and a doctor all at once. The separation of knowledge is a modern construct designed to streamline individuals into roles suited for factories and industries.

I don’t feel compelled to follow that framework. I see myself as someone who pursues knowledge, asks questions, and creates work that reflects my experience of living in this world. Art and science are both essential ways for humans to understand who we are and our place in the world.

What is your decision-making/experimentation process like when choosing the right material to use in your sculptures and immersive world-building?

Materiality and process must go hand in hand with conceptual development.

For example, in the Cry:O series, I wanted to capture the idea of life being suspended in water—an essential concept in cryogenics and egg freezing. This led me to develop the customized cooling system that could create a moment of freezing within the sculptures.

Similarly, my latest piece, The Permanent and The Insatiable, currently on view at the Moody Center for the Arts in Houston, explores how material science operates at two extremes: on the one hand, we create nearly indestructible materials, and on the other, we engineer genetically modified organisms designed to break those materials down. For this work, I collaborated with scientists to grow bacteria that produce enzymes capable of degrading PET plastic. Throughout the exhibition, the sculpture, made from PET, slowly degrades, embodying this delicate balance between permanence and decay.

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You use cooling systems in several of your works: How exactly do these cooling systems work with varying pieces, how did you become accustomed to them, and how do they help you to achieve desired visual effects?

My cooling system is based on a Peltier module, a technology commonly found in industrial cooling mechanisms. I mount the system behind a bronze casting, which lowers the temperature to around -4 degrees Celsius. This drop in temperature causes a layer of frost to form on the surface of the bronze.

Mastering this system has been a challenge, especially because these setups are DIY and inherently unreliable. I refine the process as much as possible while continuously experimenting with the bronze—its appearance, its dimensions and how it interacts with the cooling. Recently, I successfully applied the technique to a much larger sculptural piece, marking a milestone in my work.

For me, this process is mark-making, to borrow the term from painting. The frost is an integral visual element that I want to incorporate into various works in the series. However, achieving consistency is complex—factors such as the material, the scale and shape of the bronze, air circulation, and even the room temperature all impact the outcome.

Ultimately, I want to ensure the work functions reliably every time while continuously refining its aesthetic impact and pushing the visual language forward.

The Theater of Metamorphoses considers the way humanity uses technology to achieve immortality. While humans have always been innovative, what do you find unique about our particular desires in this moment of advancement & progress?

Our desire to advance and move forward and upwards is fundamental to what made us human. We invented fire. We invented industrialization. We invented capitalism, and that's what got us here. But at the same time, it also changes who we are.

I think there was a realization as I moved through life—growing up in a remote town in the northwest of China, then going to Beijing for school, later moving to the U.S., to New York, and now to London. This constant movement, change, advancement, and pursuit of a bigger, brighter life eventually made me realize that I have changed throughout the process. It’s only through this journey that I recognized that every time I left home, every time I went to a new place, I had to shed a part of who I was.

When I was younger, I didn’t fully realize the silent sacrifices I was making. But now, as I mature and understand my limitations, I am more aware of these choices. Every time I move forward, I ask myself: What am I leaving behind? I have learned this in my own small, personal life, but it’s also something we are grappling with as a species.

What price are we paying for advancement? What are the costs of extraction? Why do we feel the need to leave Earth? Why do we dream of a world beyond? 

You have defined an aspect of your current work as “cosmic metabolism.” What about the universe and it's great beyond spurs your creativity?

The word cosmic does not just refer to the planetary or globalization—it is about seeing the world not as divided into nations, not as just the surrounding place we know intimately, but as something we share collectively. At the same time, cosmic also speaks to our relationship with nature and with forces beyond our day-to-day consciousness. It is about the hidden, the unfathomable, and the immeasurable dimensions of existence.

Being able to explore ideas in such an expansive way is something I have permitted myself to do. As a woman artist and an Asian artist, I see this as a deliberate choice. We are often not expected to ask these big questions or to create work on a grand scale. But I have made it my mission to do so.

How does it feel to be presenting at Frieze this year? What types of emotions come to your surface when you present your work? 

It’s a bittersweet moment, especially after the devastating climate catastrophe. I’ve been working with the gallery Make Room and my gallerist Emilia for almost six years now. I remember our first show in a tiny storefront in Chinatown, Los Angeles. It was such a formative and precious time.

This city has supported me in many ways. I have a strong group of interdisciplinary and experimental friends from UCLA and the broader arts community here. LA is at the frontier of inclusivity and experimentation in art—it is a city open to transformation. So, for me, this moment is a reminder of the need to stand together.

I feel incredibly fortunate to be here at a time when we can gather, embrace, and share space again. I’ll be doing a poetry reading this Friday with friends as part of a fundraising effort. It’s a bittersweet time and one filled with gratitude.

If you had the chance to live forever in your youth, would you take it? 

I won't take anything forever.