This profile is Part of the Culture Shift series that focuses on people who are changing the way we think about the world around us. Read about film archivist Maya Cade, internet stars Keyon Elkins and Drew Afualo, rapper Latashá, music historian Katelina Eccleston, film director Alika Tengan, artist Kay Rufai, and actors Royle Ivy King and Nicco Annan.

Annie Liu sees his body as a tool and subject for art-making. In her work, the 36-year-old research-based artist visualizes the emotional experiences she has had at every stage of her life.

In early 2020, Liu was unable to leave her newborn baby during the pandemic, continuing her full-time job as an artist and lecturer teaching art at Princeton University. Classes through the lens of gender, social inequality, and technology. More than 3 million women have lost their jobs or dropped out of the workforce to care for children, according to an analysis by . Spring 2020 Census Bureau.

The following year, five days after giving birth to her son in August 2021, Liu had to return to work. She was not covered by her parental leave scheme or maternity leave scheme. fellow Professor at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. She had to express more breast milk than she could feed her son directly.

“This was a very interesting moment of deep integration between technology and humans. I feel like I was feeding a machine instead of my son,” Liu said. A pump that allows women to pursue what they love is very liberating, but technology can limit that as it assumes that all women can return to the workforce. .”

These are the kinds of conversations Liu regularly explores at her exhibitions. She learned how to disguise her own art as science through research and experimentation with sex and gender, female empowerment, and how technology confronts our cultural values.

at her latest exhibitionecology of care, Liu exhibits a series of works discussing the labor of motherhood, the body, and politics. record changes and use vials filled with breast milk, formula, or diaper shards to mark feedings or diaper changes. The sound of a breast pump circulating milk echoes through the gallery space. Amount of milk present in “Untitled (Feeding Through Space and Time)” It ranges from the amount produced in one lactation to the amount in one month’s lactation.

According to Liu, the feeding process is usually stimulated by seeing a baby’s pretty face or hearing a baby cry, but the baby was pumping so quickly that the sound of pumping was enough to make the milk flow. is secreted. This her experience inspired her to create pump artwork and made her question how her machine would play a role during her postpartum period.

Liu created another installment in the series, “The Surrogacy”. It depicts the uterus of a pig pregnant with a human fetus. Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World. Feminist author Shulamith Firestone argues that growing embryos outside the mother’s body “liberates women from the tyranny of reproduction.” Liu said some societies view the womb as a factory, but believes artificial wombs will never be the solution to gender inequality.

“I strongly believe that it is not technology that can change this issue. There are many social resources that we can enact, such as paid parental leave and parental subsidies,” Liu said. . “If you take away women’s right to abortion and try to force women to give birth, [additional ways] to help my mother. ”

Liu is currently exploring her own body and would like to create more projects on reproductive organs and workers’ rights.

When Liu’s parents immigrated to the United States from Guangzhou in the early 1980s, they were first-generation Chinese-American immigrants and spoke little English. Her father cooked in a Chinese restaurant and her mother cleaned hotel rooms to support her family. Growing up in Queens’ Chinatown and Flushing neighborhoods, Liu was taught from an early age that doing very well in her school was the only way to her success. Liu knew she had to work hard to get out of poverty.

There was a lot of pressure to be the perfect kid, but Liu really loved school. Her learning, she said, is to escape some of the more difficult things she experienced growing up as a Chinese-American.

“Strangers have asked me, ‘Where are you from?’ When I tell them I’m from New York City, they ask, ‘But where are you?’ For real from? ‘ she said.

Liu has a mathematics degree from Dartmouth College and a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University. In his graduate school, he found his passion for art through coding. But she didn’t know any artists within her family circle, and Ms. Liu’s parents told her it was dangerous to make her artwork. They were witnessing China’s Cultural Revolution in 1966, when a socio-political movement led by Chairman Mao Zedong imprisoned many artists.

However, Ryu was determined to pursue her art anyway.

After graduating from Dartmouth College in the recession of 2008, she remained at the college and worked as a teaching assistant in the fine arts department, facilitating a woodworking and foundry studio. I proved to my parents that I could make a living.

Liu’s upbringing influences how she views her art and career today. At her photo shoot in Flushing in August, Lew sat at a bus stop where she had been waiting two hours on her commute, and she suddenly became emotional. She said she remembers frequently quarreling with her parents over why she lived so far from her school. Her memories brought joyful tears when she realized how far she had come.

“I am so grateful to my parents for working so hard to make the American dream come true. There were so many barriers to achieving the kind of life they wanted for me,” he said. Liu said, “It was even harder living as a Chinese-American in the ’80s, but when I revisited here today, I felt very little negativity.”

Liu still remembers how embarrassed she was when she opened her lunch when she was in middle school. She always loved the homemade chive dumplings her mother packed, but she hated smelling chives in front of her white classmates. Sometimes all she wanted was a ham and cheese sandwich like everyone else.

Over a cup of coffee at the Essex Market in New York City’s Chinatown, Liu said, “You don’t really realize you’re being compared to others until you go to school.

Years later, Liu’s concerns about how scents and scents are racialized have turned into a larger conversation. launch a project. scent It can spur memories. She wanted to know if people could recognize if the smell was coming from Asians, blacks, or whites.

“I was really interested in why the same smell could be disgusting to one culture and highly enjoyable to another,” Liu said. , [could you] More empathy and interaction? I was really interested in subconscious and subliminal sensory experiences. “

For her next project, Liu plans to continue exploring breast milk as a cultural material and experiment with data visualization at the molecular level. She is also designing new courses on care within socially engaging art and design.

“Untitled (Pumping)” will be exhibited at Boston’s Mass Art Museum in a show titled “”.Designing Motherhood: What Determines Our Birth.“ Additionally, “The Surrogacy” and “Untitled (Feeding Through Space and Time)” will appear in the upcoming shows. mu hybrid art house in Holland. His two different editions of “Pregnancy Menswear” will be on display at the Grand Opening of the MIT Museum and at the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland.

“Some people might think that the idea of ​​making art is really frivolous and superfluous because you need some financial stability before you can do it,” she said. I think it’s essential.”