Xin Liu

Biography

Xin Liu is an artist and engineer who treats science as a language and technology as a means of exploring emotion, belief, and subjective experience. She trained as an engineer at Tsinghua University before earning an MFA at RISD and an MS in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, where she became founding Arts Curator of the Space Exploration Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, a role she still holds alongside an artist residency at the SETI Institute. Her best-known project, Living Distance (2019 to 2020), sent one of her own recently removed wisdom teeth into space aboard a Blue Origin rocket, carried by a crystalline robotic sculpture she engineered called EBIFA, then brought it back to tell a story of departure and transformation. Her practice spans sculpture, performance, virtual reality, and film, often using her own body as material, as in a 2023 self-portrait cast from her mouth. She was the 2024 recipient of the K11 Artist Prize, named to the 2025 Artsy Vanguard, and her first US institutional solo exhibition, Seedlings and Offsprings, opened at Pioneer Works, New York, in 2023. Her work sits in the collections of M+ Hong Kong, KADIST Foundation, Ars Electronica, and X Museum.