(airy music)
- I believe artworks are self-portraits.
It is really difficult not to carry yourself in the works.
As artists, we tear ourselves apart and reassemble it
in every piece that we are creating and recreating.
(airy music continues)
I started as an engineer basically because I was a student
who was good at math and physics.
Art later came into my life
because the pure pleasure of creating
got me quite addicted.
I grew up in the northwest part of China
in the city that is called Karamay.
It means black oil in Uyghur language, our local language.
My grandparents' generation immigrated to that area
under the state order to develop a city digging oils.
I have this memory of celebrating oil in my hometown.
All the families working on oil
will get this souvenirs from the city.
It looks like a pyramid,
and in the middle of it,
there is a drop of actual crude oil.
I want to kind of create like a magnified version of that,
but then at the same time, the bottom
of the entire work would be a fountain of oil.
(motor humming)
I kind of like the air bubble one.
I feel it's more lively, or if I really want a lot of air,
I just let the tube expose to the air.
(liquid gurgling)
I want it to have this motion inside the oil pan,
giving this sentient existence.
It's not just a passive material to be extracted.
It's a living being beneath the earth's crust
and transforming the world above it
with terror and lots of violence.
(airy music) (liquid dripping)
Growing up in a town that essentially was built
by immigrants within China, I felt very much connected
to the idea of going to a place for its resource,
creating generations and prosperity in that sense.
That entire idea is parallel to space exploration,
which is a big part of my practice,
the idea of people traveling so far going to another planet
felt like what my grandparents' generation did,
when they were in their 20s.
(rocket humming)
I started working on space exploration
when I was a grad student in MIT Media Lab.
I submitted the proposal and made a robot
that carried my tooth and went to space.
It was launched as a research project,
but for me, it is really a performance piece.
I want a part of me to go to space.
I wanted to create an avatar that enabled that journey.
- We count down, the rocket blazes, engines pulse.
Now we sing like birds breathing cedar air.
We are made of dust and light.
(ethereal music)
- There's something about expedition.
It's very beautiful, very glorious,
but at the same time, it's a very lonely journey often.
Going to Beijing for college
and going to the United States for grad school,
I was trying to arrive at somewhere for a better life,
but then that journey is just pulling me
further away from my home.
And I think as humanity,
we are imagining all this version of futures
of living on another planet, or living with AI.
But I feel like as you're leaving your current place,
some part of yourself died and shed away.
There is this inevitable death
that happens along with the growth that we so desire for.
I am thinking a lot about my own reproduction.
Nowadays, I'm at that age,
people are just telling me,
"Oh, you should freeze your eggs.
Don't even think too much about it."
I have a level of alienation and fear over that process.
(gentle music)
Reproduction technologies claim to solve all the problems,
but in fact dramatically change our body.
We freeze time in this biological machine
because we need to get a better career, we need to go study,
we haven't found a good partner yet.
I felt like it's all about productivity,
whether time is useful or not useful.
I'm making this collection of objects and sculptures
about this fear, referencing lots of bone structures,
but they're all warped and twisted
as I imagine how our body would change
through these experiences.
And I'm cooling down the sculpture to a low temperature,
so they're gonna freeze,
kind of having frost growing on the sculpture.
(dark ethereal music)
I do believe in science and technology,
in lots of its methods,
and its ability to transform the world.
But at the same time, I'm hoping there is a limit,
that we can never reach,
because it also strips away this kind of fundamental idea
of what it means to be human.
In this calibrated and measured world,
art allows beauty and emotions to be part of the process.
art allows beauty and emotions to be part of the process
(dark ethereal music continues)