Upstream Focus - Jen Liu

JE N

LIU

T h e P i n k D e t a c h m e n t

9 - 15 M ay 2 0 2 0

During the corona crisis, Upstream Gallery presents Upstream Focus, a series of one work exhibitions in our private viewing space. Every time, we will highlight one work by one artist, both online and off. The work is to be visited only by appointment.

Book your own timeslot via info@upstreamgallery.nl.

The first work is Jen Liu’s The Pink Detachment: Principle of Secure Infrastructure. This is a work from 2016 but is now more relevant than ever. In this document we will dive deep into this work and the artist.

“My work starts with impossible problems. I research the social and political conditions surrounding these problems, and build speculative solutions to these problems, which reveal the latent desires embedded within. Fantasies about collective identity and our relationships to nature and industry - are juxtaposed to reveal unexpected convergences. Minor stories - industrial texts, feminine hygiene products - reveal bigger stories about greater stories about our globalized moment.“

Jen Liu Jen Liu (New York, 1976) lives and works in New York. Her practice primarily includes painting, video, and performances, in long term bodies of work that encompass many mediums.

These bodies of work all originate in a single question: how can we solve problems that seem to have no solution? These problems are fundamentally social/cultural, but take on material forms, which on first glance may seem minor – such as inflating beef prices in China, or bureaucratic technologies to assuage the embarrassment of white-collar managers, in their attempt to manage their workers.

Liu develops solutions to these problems, full of bestguess predictions and expected trends, bound together by globalist logic: efficiency, technological optimism, historical progressivism. These solutions become labyrinthine in their attempt to solve what cannot be solved. Meanwhile, she visualizes these solutions in materials that suggest impermanence: thin gradients of paint on paper, 3D animation, genetically-altered cells that live for just a few days, corporate-speak - all the things that bravely attempt to exist despite their minor and lightweight natures. In futile efforts to describe and visualize solutions, the work is also about unexpected moments of beauty, possibilities that rise out of great duress, and emotional understandings beyond the everyday narratives of our lives.

The Pink Detachment The Pink Detachment project constitutes an important reflection on historic, political, social and gender issues. Jen Liu’s vivid style is activated to propose questions about the nature of capitalism, ideology, propaganda and advertising, and power relationships, not least of which appear in gender dynamics. Both her paintings and film get at the uneasy question of whether gender equality in the workforce is actually any kind of equality in an oppressive (capitalistic) regime.

The work The Pink Detachment: Principle of Secure Infrastructure is from 2016 but its theme is more relevant than ever and points to the power tactics of Asia’s international relations.

The Pink Detachment: Principle of Secure Infrastructure, 2016 Acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, gesso and gold watercolor on paper 130 x 84 cm unique, framed

Jen Liu about the work:

“In The Pink Detachment paintings, large feminine fingers push and prod, pressure and poke a multitude of magical-banal objects, as bobbed heads look on.

The imagery juxtaposes forms from industrial diagrams and tech manuals with mid-20th century cartoons and graphic design. There are nods to early-20th century Surrealist painting and Japanese woodblock prints, but reorganized for subtle goofiness. The combination of these forms are a way to picture economic concepts that are harder to visualize: gendered power and punishment, export/ import of Soft Power culture artifacts, the body politics of technology, and the proliferation of forms of Affective Labor. All these elements come together in a totalizing, yet effortless tableaux.

How do we we define power today? These paintings propose that power-made-visible can only be cartoonish: a bunch of disembodied fingers pushing things around. The wielding of power has become so intentionally invisible, every structure and gesture supports models of privilege and access, that locating it in a single image is absurd.

Or these paintings are a proposal for the future of power. If we are in the late stages of a push East and the female domination of industrial and service labor – maybe these are simply portraits of the world to come. Each paintings is a window to a world of pushy female fingers, the horizon awash in emotionally controlling hues.“

Further reading Jen Liu has had a busy few years. Her large scale installation PINK SLIME CAESAR SHIFT: Gold Edition was part of the Singapore Biennial.

She is a 2019 recipient of the Creative Capital Award, 2018 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant, 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video, and the 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Digital/ Electronic Art. Find more information on Jen Liu and her work through the following links: 1. Video The Pink Detachment (2015-2016) part of The Pink Detachment series.

2. A conversation between LACMA and Jen Liu Part 1 Part 2 3. Reviews of Jen Liu’s installation at the Singapore Biennial (2019-2020) thisistomorrow YP SG 4. Jen Liu’s latest exhibition at Upstream Gallery in 2018: PINK SLIME CAESAR SHIFT 5. Interview videos with Jen Liu Pioneer Works Art & Technology

Jen Liu. detail of Pink Slime Caesar Shift: Gold Edtion at the Singapore Biennial, 2019 - 2020.

Kloveniersburgwal 95 1011 KB Amsterdam t. +31 (0)20 4284284 e. info@upstreamgallery.nl