Cultures from every corner of the world have invented terrestrial stories to explain the great expanse above us — great romances between constellations or a rabbit pounding rice cakes on the face of the moon. It seems that from the beginning, we felt compelled to give voice to those roving, distant bits of light.

Artist and engineer Xin Liu brings this most primal curiosity into the 21st century, reclaiming narratives of space exploration from her own lenses of feminism and diaspora. With a studio that bears more resemblance to a scientific laboratory than a typical artist’s studio, Liu often incorporates cutting-edge technologies into her interdisciplinary practice. In Living Distance (2019-2020), Liu developed a special robotic encasement for her wisdom tooth as it travelled to suborbital space on board Blue Origin's New Shepard Rocket. For her ongoing “Cry:O” series, Liu engineered special cooling systems to coat her mixed media sculptures in a thin, fragile layer of frost. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic put the world in lockdown, Liu turned her attention to satellites — specifically from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Fashioning an antenna from a broomstick and coat hanger, Liu and her partner Gershon Dublon began to collect and translate data from these weather satellites from their backyard in Brooklyn in April 2020. From these grainy and pinging audio transmissions, Liu developed a suite of abstract images to visually capture their communications.

Continuing her dialogue with these satellites, Liu recently collaborated with Hyundai Artlab on NOAA: a fall towards home (2025), as one of the Artlab Digital Commissions. Here, the artist considers what these satellites might be saying beyond weather data. Liu asks how their own lived experiences translate into narratives. In developing scripts for three of these satellites, Liu draws a connection between her own life as a diasporic immigrant and these machines adrift in orbit, observing home from a faraway distance.

The Artlab Editors spoke to Liu about the process of creating this new work, her sources of inspiration when it comes to space, and how she views the relationship between art and science.

Your practice bridges science and art across a wide range of mediums — from sculptures that dissolve over time to launching your own tooth into space — all drawing parallels between technological advancement and the complexities of the human psyche. Was there a pivotal moment when you decided to deeply explore the human condition and the ways it shapes our conceptions of space/technology?

I was trained in science and engineering so instead of looking at science and technology as subject matter, it’s my craft or language. When I am asking questions about who I am, what I’m doing in my life, or thinking about immigration, being an artist, or a woman, I use  science and engineering to help process these questions. They are my native systems of knowledge that I used to learn about the world growing up. 

The first artwork I ever made was when I was a student at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). I was having a lot of trouble accessing my own emotions so I ended up collecting my tears and used different kinds of laboratory instruments to analyze what was in my tears. Then, I made an artificial jar of my tears based on that recipe. Somehow, that clinical and analytical process of testing and experimentation gave me lots of comfort as I was struggling with language barriers and being able to connect with the people around me. 

It’s interesting to me that you began with a science and engineering background before becoming an artist. What compelled you to pursue art? How do you see the relationship between these disciplines? 

I went to RISD for grad school so I was already in my early 20s. On the one hand, the world was already familiar to me — I like music, I like movies, I like beautiful things. But it was also incredibly far from my own reality because I didn’t know what it meant to make art. 

Art at the time was the most mystical thing and I wanted to open my world to it. But the relationship between art and science is a very big question.

If it’s helpful, maybe thinking about it in terms of your own practice?

I think for me, they’re both ways of making sense of the world: Why do I cry? Why do I struggle? Why do things that seem easy sometimes become difficult? In science, we ask very similar questions: why is the world the way it is? The apple falls from the tree…How did this all happen? It is all a way of trying to understand our own existence. 

Continuing that thread and your artistic journey, your recent Artlab Digital Commission, NOAA: a fall towards home takes the form of a clickable online narrative which is told from the perspective of three decommissioned NOAA satellites. I’d love to know what you were thinking about in the process of giving voice to these satellites and how those scripts were developed.

It was a collaborative project with the Hyundai Artlab team. From the beginning, I wanted to honor the satellites. I’ve been working with them since 2019 and they have become these companions that helped me through times in isolations during COVID-19 and also informed so much of the knowledge around what it means to see the world from outside of the world.

I learned about orbit photography. I started thinking about the iconic image of the Anthropocene as the Blue Marble being fundamental to lots of the new practices that I’m able to push forward. I’m very grateful for these satellites.

How can I share my feelings towards them with a larger audience? The whole development of the script ended up being quite personal because it is about the journeys these satellites took and how they are constantly watching home while being far away.  

This mirrors my life as a diasporic Chinese person living in the UK and in the US. I’m constantly thinking about this orbiting journey and my idea of home. 

[Hyundai Artlab] was very helpful in providing feedback on the script’s development — I’d never written anything in dialogue form before this. They also helped me to see the way they related to these machines from their own perspective. One of our producers even became quite attached to the satellites themselves and started to read about them on Reddit. 

It’s almost like having a toy that you really loved growing up — you want to tell everyone everything about it. That’s really where it all started. But in the end, all the stories you tell are, in some way, ultimately about yourself.

After hearing about this project, I also did a deep dive into all these NOAA Reddit forums. It’s really striking to see how these satellites have such a dedicated fan base. People love culling from the raw data they’re able to collect and feel kinship with these machines for many different reasons. 

It started during COVID, when everyone was isolating. People began chasing these satellites to receive data. I thought it was beautiful because at the time, humans were trapped but these satellites were out there, constantly orbiting the globe. It felt like they were the only things still seeing the world. Being able to connect with them, even briefly, helped me feel that there was still a world out there. The feeling of detachment during COVID was so strong. I felt kind of lost in that time. 

I did a project where we followed one satellite as it passed over Shanghai and then over New York in one sweep; both stations were receiving data together. I felt like we somehow had this very long kite that sends a signal and we both saw it from the other side of the world.

Space is often rendered as this vast, expansive void. It conjured grandeur and unknowability. I’m curious to know what you see in space, and what about it resonates with you and your practice.

I like how, when you talk about space, you immediately enter realms that are expansive: both in terms of temporal and spatial scale. It’s a very fertile ground for lots of subjects that I’m interested in. Aesthetically, I’m drawn to deserts and vastness. I’m drawn to a void. I think maybe it has something to do with growing up in the desert myself.

A lot of my work deals with time and space and space exploration. It gives me a kind of permission to tell stories at a scale that is so hard to access in our daily life but is still happening at every single moment. Right now, we are on this planet orbiting around the sun, we’re just not aware of it. Working closely with space as a context helped me to stimulate that part of my sensation.

This idea of exploration is interesting for me. I’m always coming back to the question of why someone leaves home. I have friends who forever want to leave. I also have friends who are terrified of leaving their neighborhood. There’s something very human about this desire and fear. This idea of exploration is also related to this idea of frontiers. In science and technology, there’s this idea that as a human, you’re constantly pushing these frontiers. It’s almost a religious narrative — that this is why we’ve been put on earth. 

The way you described the vastness and void-ness of space being fertile ground is also quite spiritual. I think it’s also in quite sharp contrast to so much of our typical thinking around space and science, which tends to be very accelerationist. Your conception of space feels, by contrast, introspective, slowed down, and interior. 

I feel that we live in a deeply age-ist society. So much of what mainstream culture values seems shaped by the mindset of someone in their late 20s or early 30s. It’s all about growth and exploration and this ride up is a stronger, faster, and most optimized version of what life can offer. We’re heavily biased by this one very loud voice. 

My parents just retired and they are now experiencing a whole new life that I find quite beautiful. They’re on a new road strip every weekend, living like Patti Smith on the road now that they’re in their 60s. There are so many possibilities for how we live our lives. We’re just not paying enough attention to things.

Space has been historically male dominated, though it has changed quite a lot in the past 10 years. Still, earlier in my career when I was working on a project relating to space, I was criticized for being too grand. As a female artist, that’s something your work shouldn’t be. It should be intimate and domestic. But I want my work to be all of it: domestic and intimate and grand and about space and the earth and myself, all at the same time. I think we’re finally there. 

Today, when we think about space, you probably think about the billionaire class, technological innovations, mining — all of that. But this isn’t what we thought about when we looked at the sky as children. We thought about the moon and its rabbit and all the stories about the things that happen in all the stars. I want to return us to that world and live a different story line.

These days, there are so many beautiful works produced by artists and practitioners that are changing the narrative that science is this abstract space. It’s almost like owning the aesthetic agenda of science. I feel like I work within this process.

Places like space and deserts are also so often rendered as empty expanses, devoid of life or presence when they are anything but. What your work does so well is hold all of that in unison, without caving into our prescriptive binaries. It captures a truer, more nuanced picture. 

I also feel like your work speaks to a kind of return to our most primal understanding and relationship with space, creating these narrative structures and stories. You’re doing the exact same thing with these satellites. I’m curious what depictions of space in popular media you’ve drawn inspiration from. 

I really liked Ted Chiang’s 1998 book, “Story of Your Life.—the one that inspired the film Arrival.. At its core, the book is about language—how the understanding of language is the understanding of time. I think that’s the most important question in science and physics today:

Right now, we’re living in a timeline where the future dominates. We live under a tyranny of the future where the present doesn’t exist. But I believe there may be a moment, perhaps in the next 100 years, when we finally understand time as movements and relationships. This will finally allow us to live our lives differently, not caring about growth. Much of this, I think, has already been felt by people before science tried to quantify it—through faiths like Buddhism, for example. It’s not about rejecting science, but about rethinking how we make sense of the world beyond our limited perception.

I’m really excited for that world to come but maybe I’ll be dead by then. But that’s okay.

Time doesn’t exist!

Exactly. Time doesn’t exist. I’ll be alive and dead at the same time.

See Earth through a satellite’s eyes. Begin your journey

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Introduction and questions by Artlab Editors. Learn more about the digital commission on Hyundai Artlab’s website. This article was published in collaboration with Artlab Editorial.