Glorious Substances, Beautiful Settings
Jen Liu
17 January - 7 March 2026
Glorious Substances, Beautiful Settings
Jen Liu
Upstream Gallery is pleased to present Glorious Substances, Beautiful Settings, a new solo exhibition by Jen Liu (USA, 1976), opening on January 17, 2026. The exhibition brings together Liu’s latest video work and paintings, part of FUTURE PERFECT 888666, a body of work based on the stories of Chinese migrant women in the Americas. This chapter brings together interviews with 19th-century Chinese sex workers in the United States and contemporary AI microworkers, structured by the circular logic of Chinese microdramas (online platform soap operas) and the neurological effects of mercury poisoning.
For Liu, contemporary digital platform gig labor depends on incomplete and false documentation, invisibility of the work done, hours spent, and anonymity of the workers themselves. These gaps echo the effects of
mercury poisoning, including memory loss, numbness, loss of words and peripheral vision. Invisibility was necessary for migrant Chinese women in the 19th century: who gained entry by lying about their identities and memories, then proceeded as sex workers in San Francisco Chinatown’s alleyways and scattered mining encampments. Hiding from police raids and suffering from VD’s, they often used mercury as a remedy, leading to mercury poisoning on undocumented scales. All of this forms a transhistorical loop of memory loss, toxicity, and work that equates invisibility with survival.
A new series of paintings depict the backs of women’ s heads with hair arranged in fantastical forms playing off late Qing Dynasty Chinese hairstyles. Strong geometric forms have oozing strings, emoji patterns, and droplets of mercury laid atop or emerging from within. The works offer a surreal meditation on historical presence without identity; and history precariously assembled through artificial traces and hidden motivations. These paintings reflect Liu’s ongoing work with 19th century immigration case files of Chinese migrant women in San Francisco, reviewing folder after folder of women, filled with fake life stories, whose real stories are forever lost to time.
Back of Head: Third Eye Hi, 2025
Acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, handmade mica and cinnabar-based acrylic paints, trace e-waste, and gesso on paper
Painting: 130 x 88 cm
Frame: 134.5 x 92.5 cm
Acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, handmade mica and cinnabar-based acrylic paints, trace e-waste, and gesso on paper
Painting: 130 x 88 cm
Frame: 134.5 x 92.5 cm
Back of Head: Nuwa’s Gone Sour, 2025
and gesso on paper
Painting: 130 x 88 cm
Frame: 134.5 x 92.5 cm
Back of Head: Donut Cushion, 2025
Acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, handmade mica and cinnabar-based acrylic paints, trace e-waste,
Painting: 130 x 88 cm
Frame: 134.5 x 92.5 cm
Back of Head: Zao Nainai’s Snacktime, 2025
Acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, handmade mica and cinnabar-based acrylic paints, trace e-waste, and gesso on paper
Painting: 130 x 88 cm
Frame: 134.5 x 92.5 cm
Back of Head: Tunnel of Love, 2025
Acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, handmade mica and cinnabar-based acrylic paints, trace e-waste, and gesso on paper
Back of Head: She Cracked, 2025
Painting: 130 x 88 cm
Frame: 134.5 x 92.5 cm
Acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, handmade mica and cinnabar-based acrylic paints, trace e-waste, and gesso on paper
Painting: 130 x 88 cm
Frame: 134.5 x 92.5 cm
Back of Head: Double Bun, 2025
Acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, handmade mica and cinnabar-based acrylic paints, trace e-waste, and gesso on paper
Back of Head: Wangmu’s Peaches, 2025
Acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, handmade mica and cinnabar-based acrylic paints, trace e-waste, and gesso on paper
Painting: 130 x 88 cm
Frame: 134.5 x 92.5 cm
and gesso on paper
Painting: 130 x 88 cm
Frame: 134.5 x 92.5 cm
Back of Head: Flophouse, 2025
Acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, handmade mica and cinnabar-based acrylic paints, trace e-waste,
Painting: 130 x 88 cm
Frame: 134.5 x 92.5 cm
Back of Head: Birdie Boo, 2025
Acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, handmade mica and cinnabar-based acrylic paints, trace e-waste, and gesso on paper
Liu uses those immigration case file texts as a script in her new video, Time Traveler in D-Block. It begins with a contemporary microworker who dies due to exhaustion. This starts a time travel loop, in which she travels to the candlelit 19th century, and to the flowing silks and female solidarity of a Tang Dynasty court, and back again. But this soon breaks down into soap opera theatrics and syphilitic skin sores, set to interview transcripts from today’s microworkers, about what it’s like to work for hours on end with no break, little pay, and no protection. Finally, we see Mercury as a speaking character: She’s a fluidic future, in which everything solid has broken down. Labor, identity, and history liquefy, as truth and fiction, organic and synthetic, past and present become indistinguishable.
The title of the exhibition borrows a quote by Marc Andreessen on “reality privilege,” in which he asserts that the forthcoming world of simulations is primarily for the poor, to improve what Andreessen thinks of as their otherwise miserable existences. If this is true, what kind of fluid realities will be created?
Time Traveler in D-Block, 2026 Video
30 min.
Edition of 6 plus 2 artist’s proofs (#1/6)
