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“Perhaps there is a speculative future in which workers can use a historic, anti-colonial method of political resistance: collective disappearance through mass departure and burial of all material traces. Whether it is hopeful or cynical, a practical suggestion or metaphor, it is an attempt to answer: how to make the most of one’s inevitable disappearance?” — Jen Liu

PINK SLIME CAESAR SHIFT: GOLD LOOP reflects on e-waste, political resistance, and the “disappearance” or state-sponsored kidnappings of labor activists — in response to protesting their exposure to toxins. Gathering firsthand accounts of women electronics workers in South China, the artist investigated the physical, legal, and biochemical realities of gold extraction from e-waste. Chemicals seep into the environment and accumulate in the bodies of workers, causing long-term environmental poisoning — a mirror image of the industrial poisoning incurred by the production of electronics in the first place, “a gold loop.” In one segment, a corporate worker teaches a course on “circular economics,” a technical term corporations use to justify the production of electronics, claiming to have e-waste recycling in mind. But circular economics obscure the truth of its chemical toxicity and the compartmentalized geographies of environmental racism.

Custom wood boxes with a hand-painted iPhone 15 package design on one side are featured in the choreography of the related performance commission, GHOST__WORLD: a performance for 4 dancers staged at The Lab in San Francisco on April 27 and 28. The choreography originated in first-hand interviews with electronics and e-waste workers in South China (conducted by Liu in 2022). An overwhelming sense of disconnection and dim prospects are routed through references to a number of traditions, including the synchronized dances of “frog mothers” — illegal street vendors wearing inflatable frog costumes, selling frog-shaped balloons.

A green fluorescent protein precedes a message containing legal code regarding the legal rights of industrially poisoned factory workers. Both are translated into synthetic DNA, introduced into cow muscle cells via chemical transfection, then stored on silica particles. The silica particles lie inside a small indent in the ring, and are sealed in with a wart-like bead. In this way the DNA information can be stored safely for future access. Once introduced into an in-vitro beef source, another worker could find this message by shining a cheap blacklight on a sample, while otherwise checking for pathogens in a microscope: it will glow ghostly green.

Preceding the legal code is a message from the past: Qiu Jin’s letter to her friend Xü Xiaoshu, on the eve of her execution for her feminist activism in 1907:
Anguished by my fellow countrymen who are drunk in fatuous dreams,
Lamenting my broken homeplace with no one yet to keep its spirits.
At the end of the day and at the end of the way, tears of despair are in vain;
Mutilated mountains and leftover waters, who can summon back the ghosts of their integrity?
No need for a lone grave of a meter size, since China no longer has clean soil;
With a cup of wine, let us sing the songs of her spirit beyond the times.

“This bracelet is not the simple band and coil object of the original. Yet revisionism expands exposure of the original — signal boosting by candy coating — which is the logical heart of Pink Slime Caesar Shift.” — Jen Liu

This wearable sculpture—a bracelet—is a functional redesign of an anti-static bracelet, as worn by electronics factory workers. The bracelets electrically ground the workers, so they don’t generate static shock, potentially frying the circuits of the products they are assembling. They also monitor the movements of the workers. This information can be used to reduce pay to the bare minimum of working time. Here, they are made of pink acrylic cast around a gold-plated brass circuit with fine manual mechanisms for customized fit, skin contact points, and a connection port that can be retrofit to work with existing electronic grounding circuit boards.

Since 2016 Liu has been working on Pink Slime Caesar Shift (PSCS), a body of work based on the idea of building alternative networks for labor activism in China. PSCS proposes to build a secret information network for Chinese labor activists through the domestic food distribution grid – by inserting covert messages into the DNA code of in-vitro beef hamburgers. In accordance with the PSCS narrative, this bracelet contains genetically modified cow muscle cells containing data of particular interest to labor activists in South China — within gold-plated brass capsules embedded in the acrylic, that separated it from the static circuit (thus inert). The cells contain synthetic DNA in two parts: the first part initiates the production of yellow fluorescent protein, which makes the cell identifiable under a fluorescent microscope. The second part is a lightly encrypted text which lists 40 historically proofed methods of non-violent protest from the Einstein Institute.

A Better Life For The Workers (I) was originally an internal training manual for activists working with and educating factory workers in Shenzhen, developed by Hong Kong-based NGO Worker Empowerment throughout the early 2000s. More widely published in Chinese in 2013, the manual describes and analyzes the psychological, political, and legal issues shaping industrial work life in modern China. This book is a re-publication of the original Chinese version alongside a 2021 English translation, designed by Liu to reflect themes of hiding in plain sight, and dissolving visibility. These themes speak to the fate of the labor activists and NGOs, increasingly dire since 2019.