Xin Liu: Self Devourer

To create a being out of oneself is very serious. I am creating myself. And walking in complete darkness in search of ourselves is what we do. 

- Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva 

In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts. 

- Wallace Stevens, Parts of the world

The collection of works on view in Self Devourer at Make Room was conceived during various points of the past two years. A scattering of moments and thoughts as I, along with the world itself, entered an unfamiliar, everything-doing-just-fine mode of being and living. I sensed a hint of repression. Every moment, every tiniest decision, every bit, byte and atom, can cause the most dramatic change. Yet, we glide through life.

All humans share 99.9% of their genetic makeup and are within 50th cousins of each other.

“Am I Asian American to you?” I once asked a friend of mine, a second-generation Asian American himself. “No.” He explained that I was not because I did not share the same kind of upbringing which formed a crucial part of his identity. Then I asked “How about your mother?” He paused for a few seconds, then looked directly into my eyes and said, “No, I guess she is not.”

When I sequenced my genome in 2019, I was overwhelmed by the amount of data produced from a tiny droplet of saliva: 3,117,275,501 base pairs. How can one decipher something that large?

There comes a point in life where one confronts their own triviality. A common story shared here: students studying abroad till their immigration, marriage and, perhaps, parenthood. I desperately, secretly, hoping to find something special, in the most literal sense, from within myself. Having my DNA tested was thrilling—a revelation of the most forbidden of secrets. I was disappointed.

Sometimes I feel myself falling: a drop of water falls into the ocean. The sensation of disappearing gave me a peculiar sense of calmness. I was part of it.    

To grasp this idea, I made an accordion book that could extend however long needed while allowing me to meditate in the process of printing, gluing, rubbing, and folding. It ended up being a book of about one thousand pages of the tiniest letters that I could read with bare eyes. The volume and weight of these papers were my access to the spells contained in every cell of mine. 

Several years later, when I traveled back to the US after a long trip home, I felt this unshakable disconnect with myself. I struggled to recognize and locate myself among the various identities I am constantly obtaining and losing, and often wondered in my thoughts alone in the studio: an artist, a woman, an engineer, a Chinese immigrant, an Asian American, a daughter… 

Being an artist is quite consuming. The artist has an insatiable appetite. I realized I had become this relentless creature consuming herself. I had to cut her open for examination, for reassembly, for display. She is my only material. The only thing that is mine. 

That was when I dug out those papers I had made, the extra duplicates from the book of mine. Somehow, as I flipped through the pages, those unreadable bytes and bits were no longer confusing. These mysterious letters presented me with an opening: a slate of meaninglessness, of intuition, of plausible translation without understanding. And so I began to sew.